Transient Analysis of Railway Sleeper using Three-Dimensional Finite Element Method
- Vol, 102(4), December
- USA Springer 2021
- 1113-1128p.
research article presents the study of the transient behavior of railway sleepers subjected to the static load and the impact factor considered for the dynamic effects. The three-dimensional stress and deformation analysis of the concrete and the reinforced concrete (RC) sleeper has been carried out using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Also, the effect of pre-stressing in the RC sleeper has been considered by applying the boundary conditions suitably as per the manufacturing practice followed currently. Introducing the concept of pre-stressing creates an opportunity in utilizing the maximum strength of a sleeper. The transient analysis has been performed by capturing the actual industry practice. The behavioral study of railway sleeper subjected to transient concentrated load has been made by taking into account the dynamic load factor associated with the process. The three-dimensional finite element analysis (FEA) has been performed to evaluate the stress and the deformation in the concrete and reinforced concrete sleeper. The parametric study is carried out considering the effect of pre-stressing on the reinforced concrete sleeper, which shows that the train's maximum speed can be increased with the increased load-carrying capacity for the same locomotive. Further, results show that pre-stressing has a significant improvement in the strength of the sleeper. The emphasis is kept on stress and deformation variation over the length of the sleeper. The analysis that has been simulated in this paper shows that introducing the reinforcements in the concrete sleeper for the time-variant dynamic load validates the usefulness of railway sleeper. The use of tendons reduces the deflection of reinforced concrete sleeper. The reinforcements does not reduce the flexural stresses in the concrete structure, they may only increase its moment carrying capacity depending upon the percentage of reinforcement. In the analysis of the reinforced concrete sleeper, the concept of pre-stressing shows that the amount of generated maximum principal and bending stresses gets reduced in the sleeper, which shows that the strength of the reinforced concrete sleeper has got increased. Based on the analysis, the speed of the train under the same design configuration can be increased up to 206 km/hr within the ultimate loading capacity. Some new conclusions are presented from the current investigation under varied condition, which would be helpful for many researchers.