The majority of maintenance work, including rail grinding, is performed at night through possession of the track, so a reduction in the time required would be beneficial. Increasing the metal removal rate (MRR) would be the best opportunity to achieve this. Industry sectors such as aerospace have achieved this through significant advances in grinding technologies recently, resulting in increases in MRR. This work was aimed at assessing best practice from the aerospace sector and its application to the rail grinding operations. The current Network Rail grinding operations are done at varying rates ranging from 1-10 mph. Opportunities exist to increase both train speed and depth of cut to improve productivity of these operations. The most relevant technology used in the aerospace industry is High Efficiency Deep Grinding (HEDG). This technology uses high wheel surface speeds, super abrasive tooling and high work piece feed rates to remove material quickly from a cut zone. Improvements in productivity were identified by applying theory on power requirements and chip thickness of the grinding process. Specific Grinding Energy and Chip Thickness were calculated both for the current grinding set-up (using super abrasive tooling) and for full HEDG implementation. In addition computer modelling was performed to assess the impact of any technology change on potential gouging or interference with track infrastructure. The work concluded that opportunities do exist to improve the current productivity of grinding operations. Utilising HEDG technology theoretically provides a significant train speed increase. This requires the application of high grinding wheel surface speeds and super abrasive technology. In addition, changing the orientation of the grinding wheel to cutting on its periphery provides an opportunity to reduce the number of individual spindles on a grinding train. However, an increase in train speed or cut width would require increased power application to each grinding spindle. The application of HEDG technology cutting on the periphery of the wheel also provided optimum conditions to avoid rail gouging and surrounding infrastructure.
Rail Grinding for the 21st Century - Taking a Lead from the Aerospace Industry
2012
7 Seiten, 3 Bilder, 5 Tabellen, 4 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
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