Rail-wheel interaction plays a key role in determining the life of railway tracks. An increase in the speed and axle load leads to significant wear and fatigue damage on materials resulting in a safety concern for the Indian Railway network. In response to the above context, rail grinding technology is introduced to maintain the stability and safety of the railway system. In the present work, three (3) Zones named South-Central Railway (SCR), North Central Railway (NCR) and Northern Railway (NR) of Indian Railways (IR) were prone to severe problems pertaining to wear and fatigue damage were selected for the rail grinding performance studies. From the collected data, the performance features in terms of rail wear, width and position of contact band, length and pitch of crack, attainment of target profile, defect generation rate and rail/weld fracture analysis were evaluated. Average wear rates per 100 Gross Million Tonnes (GMT) at SCR, NCR and NR for the tangent track were found to be 0.8165 mm, 0.296 mm and 0.335 mm respectively after grinding. In addition, the average wear rate per 100 GMT for the curved track at SCR and NCR were noted as 0.5495 mm and 0.4255 mm respectively excluding NR where monitoring has been done only for tangent tracks. Moreover, significant improvements in terms of contact band width/position, target profile achievement, amount of defect generation and rail/weld fractures were obtained for the respective test locations when the pre and post-grinding data was compared. As a result, the findings achieved from the selected test site locations exposed the importance of rail grinding operation as well as enhancement in the service life of the rail for the world’s largest multimodal railway network - Indian Railways.
Influence of Rail Grinding Operations on the World's Largest Multimodal Network
Sae Technical Papers
International Conference on Advances in Design, Materials, Manufacturing and Surface Engineering for Mobility ; 2022
2022-12-23
Conference paper
English
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