Basics of Calculating Anti-Theft Crane Device from Eccentric and Tick-Borne Mechanisms

According to the requirements of the “Rules for industrial safety of cranes”, anti-theft devices must ensure that cranes under the influence of wind force stop at any point on the track, including at the junction of rails connected by side strips. Various types of anti-theft crane devices recommended for use have a number of disadvantages. Thus, the supply of anti-theft crane devices made in the form of lever grips interacting with the rail head with mechanisms for disengaging and converging grippers with electromechanical, electromagnetic, hydraulic or pneumatic drives complicates their design. There are also known anti-theft crane devices, in which the stopping of cranes on a rail track is carried out by a locking eccentric interacting with the surface of the rail head. The reliability of such devices is insufficient, since, due to the constant force of the spring, the adhesion force of the eccentric to the rail does not depend on the changing wind force. The paper proposes the basics of calculating the anti-theft crane device, representing the kinematic connection of two mechanisms – eccentric and thick-borne, which allows to solve a number of the above problems.

Best practices about rail defects: a review of the book “Defects of rails. Stresses and Damages”, Vol. 1 by K.-O. Edel, G. Budnitskiy, T. Schnitzer

The review analyzes a monograph published by Springer Vieweg publishing house, which presents scientific approaches to the problems of defect formation in railway rails. The advantages of the book under review include the analysis of statistical data on rail failures, description of test methods and damage diagnostics. The book discusses in detail the widely occurring types of contact-fatigue defects formed during operation in the rail head: internal longitudinal shelling, multiple parallel head checks, surface squats und studs in the middle of the rolling surface with a greater or lesser degree deformations

Influence of hydro-pneumatic accumulator on the hydraulic drive of the brush work body of light type track machines

The main direction of improving the repair processes of all types and the current maintenance of the track is to reduce the time and labor costs with the highest possible level of mechanization and automation of all types of track work. At the same time, a significant place is occupied by cleaning the tracks from weeds and excess ballast. The working body of the machines for performing these works is a brush picker with flexible blades, which provides cleaning of weeds and ballast below the level of the rail head. As a rule, on domestic machines, flexible blades are segments of a steel cable with a diameter of 16…21 mm. One of the main disadvantages of brush pickers with cable blades is the relatively low efficiency due to fatigue breaking of the flexible blades at the point of exit from the seal. There are also known design solutions with the use of blades made of rubber tape. The most successful is the combination of cable and belt blades on one picker. The main type of drive for such a working body should be considered a volumetric hydraulic drive, which allows you to solve the problem structurally in the simplest and most effective way. Since the picker blades interact with the object (ballast rubble) alternately ( usually there are 8-12 blades) the load on the drive is non-stationary, the pressure in the pressure line of the drive hydraulic motor changes sinusoidally, which negatively affects the reliability and durability of the drive. To smooth out pressure fluctuations, it is recommended to use a hydropneumulator.

Eddy Current Probe Configuration for Full Rail Top Surface Inspection

In this paper, we have carried out an experimental study of the detection of top rail surface cracks. Firstly, we have highlighted the inability to inspect the entire rail head surface by a single sensor with a single scan. To overcome this inspection inability, we have proposed a multisensor system composed of three differential probes arranged within a specific configuration. The yielded results showed the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed configuration in the detection of cracks regardless its size, orientation and location.

Inspection of transverse flaws for railways using phased array ultrasonic technique

Rail monitoring is an important activity which aims to preserve the safety and availability of railways. According to statistics, the primary cause of railway accidents is due to transverse defects that occur in the rail head. These special defects develop generally in a plane orthogonal to the rail running direction. The detection of these defects is a priority to increase the safety of rail transportation. Rail control monitoring techniques mostly rely on infrared thermography, eddy currents, air-coupled acoustic sensors, and ultrasounds. The present research studies the rail diagnosis by means of a non-contact device. The focus is on ultrasonic based methods where excitation is generated by thermal elastic coupling following laser irradiation of the rail head. For the reception of echoes, a special ultrasound sensor was used. In order to sense defects, phased array elements, which use multiple transducers and electronic time delays, are used to increase and to focalise the signal intensity. Flaws that have a moderate extension are better detected by the proposed method than with laser irradiation consisting of a single spot.

Physical Nature of Strengthening Mechanisms During Extremely Long-Term Operation of Rails

The quantitative estimation of strengthening mechanisms of rails’ surface layer is carried out on the basis of regularities and formation mechanisms of structure-phase states revealed by the methods of modern physical materials science. It is performed at different depths of the rail head along the central axis and fillet of differentially quenched 100-meter rails after the extremely long-term operation (gross passed tonnage of 1411 mln tons). A long-term operation of rails is accompanied by the formation of structural constituent gradient consisting of a regular change in the relative content of lamellar pearlite, fractured pearlite, the structure of ferrite-carbide mixture, scalar, and excess dislocation density along the cross-section of the rail head. As the distance to the rail fillet surface decreases, the relative content of metal volume with lamellar pearlite decreases. However, the relative content of metal volume with the presence of the fractured pearlite structure and ferrite-carbide mixture increases. The contributions caused by the matrix lattice friction, intraphase boundaries, dislocation substructure, presence of carbide particles, internal stress fields, solid-solution strengthening, pearlite component of steel structure are estimated. It is shown that the main mechanism of strengthening in the surface layer is due to the interaction of moving dislocations with low-angle boundaries of nanometer dimensional fragments and subgrains. The main dislocation strengthening mechanism in a near-surface layer at a depth of 2-10 mm is due to the interaction of moving dislocations with immobile ones.

Simulation research on temperature field and stress field during rail grinding

The rail grinding process generates a large amount of heat, which could lead to heat damage on the ground rails. But, the whole temperature field of rail ground by the grinding train has not been explored in detail. In the present study, finite element models of a rail and grinding wheel were established to simulate the rail grinding process. The temperature field and the thermo-mechanical coupling stress during rail grinding, and the residual stress after grinding were studied. Furthermore, through simplifying grinding wheels into heat sources, the temperature field of rail ground by a whole grinding train was investigated as well. The results indicated that the grinding temperature and the residual stress increased with the grinding depth and rotational speed, but decreased with the feed speed and radius of rail head. The thermo-mechanical coupling stress increased with the radius of rail head and grinding depth, and decreased with the rotational speed and feed speed. When ground by the whole grinding train, the increase in the number of grinding wheels at the same grinding angle and adjacent angles could lead to a rise in temperature on the rail surface. The speeds of grinding train and the rail head radius also have an influence on the temperature. The optimal feed speed of the grinding train should be below 12 km/h for R300, 16 km/h for R80, and 18 km/h for R13. The results could be used to optimize the grinding parameters and grinding pattern in the field.

Simulation of differentiated thermal processing of railway rails by compressed air

Mathematical modeling of differentiated thermal processing of railway rails with air has been carried out. At the first stage, onedimensional heat conduction problem with boundary conditions of the third kind was solved analytically and numerically. The obtained temperature distributions at the surface of the rail head and at a depth of 20 mm from the rolling surface were compared with experimental data. As a result, value of the coefficients of heat transfer and thermal conductivity of rail steel was determined. At the second stage, mathematical model of temperature distribution in a rail template was created in conditions of forced cooling and subsequent cooling under natural convection. The proposed mathematical model is based on the Navier-Stokes and convective thermal conductivity equations for the quenching medium and thermal conductivity equation for rail steel. On the rail – air boundary, condition of heat flow continuity was set. In conditions of spontaneous cooling, change in temperature field was simulated by heat conduction equation with conditions of the third kind. Analytical solution of one-dimensional heat conduction equation has shown that calculated temperature values differ from the experimental data by 10 %. When cooling duration is more than 30 s, change of pace of temperature versus time curves occurs, which is associated with change in cooling mechanisms. Results of numerical analysis confirm this assumption. Analysis of the two-dimensional model of rail cooling by the finite element method has shown that at the initial stage of cooling, surface temperature of the rail head decreases sharply both along the central axis and along the fillet. When cooling duration is over 100 s, temperature stabilizes to 307 K. In the central zones of the rail head, cooling process is slower than in the surface ones. After forced cooling is stopped, heating of the surface layers is observed, due to change in heat flow direction from the central zones to the surface of the rail head, and then cooling occurs at speeds significantly lower than at the first stage. The obtained results can be used to correct differential hardening modes.