Static structural analysis on a Railwheel and Track setup
Static Structural Analysis on the Railwheel and Track setup
To perform the static structural analysis on railwheel and track model for two different bearing loading cases. Compare the results of Total Deformation, Equivalent Stress, and life under both the loads. Also to implement a user-defined result and compare with the theoretical value along with the inbuilt result of ANSYS.
Model Setup:
The 3d model of Railwheel and track is imported into ANSYS SpaceClaim. The complete model is required for the static structural analysis, therefore no alterations are made on the geometry.
The Structural Steel material is assigned to the complete model and the properties are as shown below
Contacts Definition:
We can see from the model there are two contact regions, firstly a frictional contact with a coefficient of 0.3 is selected between the railwheel and track. Then, the second contact between the Wheel Shaft and inner surface of the wheel there is frictionless contact between them.
Joint Definition:
For static structural analysis of this model and to simulate the boundary conditions there is a requirement to define three joints. The fixed joint is applied on the track\'s face to constrain all the degree of freedom.
A Translational Joint is applied on the shaft along the X-axis because the wheel will roll on the track in that particular direction. A Planar Joint is applied on the face of the wheel. It is used to limit the wheel\'s degree of freedom to the rotation along Z-axis and translational along X and Y-axis. The images are as shown below
Meshing:
The whole model has meshed for 40mm except the faces which are in contact has been refined using Face Sizing. In face sizing, the contact regions have meshed with element size of 25mm. The element quality has been taken care and the number of nodes and elements are well within the allowable limit.
Boundary Conditions:
The boundary condition for the railwheel and track assembly are displacement of 500mm and a bearing load of 100KN. The shaft of the wheel is provided with a displacement of 500mm over 5 seconds interval with a 100mm displacement over each second.
In this project, the bearing load is applied for two different cases (100KN and 500KN). A constant bearing load of 100KN is imposed on the inner surface of the wheel in the negative Y direction. The load is transferred on the wheel by the shaft.
Analysis Settings:
The simulation is run for 5 steps of 1 second each. For the first step, Auto Time stepping is set to program-controlled. For the rest of the four sub-steps, a minimum time step of 1e-003 and a maximum time step of 0.1 seconds is set. The other output and nonlinear are modified accordingly.
Results:
Case 1: For 100 KN bearing load
Total Deformation
Equivalent Stress (Von-Mises)
Equivalent Elastic Strain
Fatigue
Case 2: For 500 KN bearing load
Total Deformation
Equivalent Stress
Equivalent Strain
Fatigue
User-Defined Result (Displacement): This was calculated in case 2 and results USUM is exactly the same as that obtained from the default inbuilt ANSYS result of Total deformation