Failure analysis of wheel and rail problems

• Main Author: Teo, Yong Le
• Other Authors: Pang Hock Lye, John
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177443
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The wheel rail interface has many problems detrimental to the reliability of the Singapore MRT. The rolling stock and permanent way are often inspected and maintained to enable high reliability and safety records. The objective of this final year project is to do a failure analysis of wheel and rail problems and develop Excel calculations for rail wear, rail wear degradation by Weibull distribution and fatigue life of thermite weld. The main concern with the wheels are wheel flat, wheel wear and wheel rolling contact fatigue and the main concern with the rails are thermite weld failure, rail wear and rail rolling contact fatigue. In this research, the main concern with wheel and rail defects have been studied. This include the cause of defect formation and the defect progression. Multiple industry solutions to detect these failures have been briefly looked at. The wheel impact load detector (WILD) for wheel flat and laser technologies are used to measure the wheel profile. The rail defect detection consist of technologies such as ultrasonic and laser inspection equipment to identify rail fracture and rail profile respectively. Mitigation methods of wheel and rail grinding have been briefly researched. Three calculations models were studied in this report the Archard’s wear model and Weibull distribution based on Wang Jin Long’s thesis as well as the fatigue life of thermite weld based on Liu Yang’s thesis. Two Excel calculations have been developed the Archard’s wear model and Weibull distribution to find the wear life and the reliability of the rails respectively.