A methodology for assessing structural reliability of railroad tank cars undergoing fatigue crack growth is being developed. A three-degree-of freedom (3-dof) surface crack is employed to account for an asymmetric stress field existing at a fatigue critical location in tank car structures. A fatigue life prediction program using the Walker equation to account for stress ratio effects is developed for the 3-dof surface crack model. A component reliability problem is formulated as a limit state function and solved using a first-order reliability method along with importance sampling method within the commercial reliability software, STRUREL. The methodology is demonstrated using illustrative railroad tank car examples. The results show that: (a) failure probability, Pt, increases as tank car mileage increases; (b) welding residual stresses in the tank structure can significantly increase Pf; (c) uncertainty in the stress amplitude also has a significant effect on Pf; and (d) the correlation between initial crack depth and initial crack aspect ratio is an important parameter.


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    Title :

    A methodology for assessing fatigue crack growth reliability of railroad tank cars


    Contributors:
    Zhao, Wei (author) / Sutton, Michael A. (author) / Pena, Jose (author)


    Publication date :

    2004


    Size :

    15 Seiten, 27 Quellen




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English






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