Week 2 Railwheel and Track

Static Structural Analysis on Rail wheel and Track.

Objective:

Perform a static structural analysis on the Railwheel and Track setup and

Case 1: Multiply the bearing load by 5 times and compare the results with the load of 100000 N. Compare the Total Deformation, Equivalent stress, and the life under both the loads

Case 2: Implement a User-defined result and calculate the Total Deformation from this result and check if it is the same as that obtained by the inbuilt result by ANSYS for a load of 100000 N.

Procedure:

Case1:

For Case 1, Static Structural Analysis is carried out on Rail Wheel and Track. The material is Structural Steel, the bearing load for the case 1 is kept as 50,000 N and the analysis is carried out on Ansys Workbench. The geometry of the model is imported on the Ansys Workbench for analysis.

The properties of the material is stated below:

Density: 7850 kg/m³

Tensile Yield Strength: 2.5E+08 Pa

Tensile Ultimate Strength: 4.6E+08 Pa

Young’s Modulus: 1.2E+05

The model is meshed using Ansys Mesher with an element size of 35 mm, for the faces which are in contact and 50 mm for the rest of the faces and a patch conforming method using tetrahedrons was employed. This is done to get the best refinement within the limitation of Ansys Academic License.

A mesh metric that identifies the elements according to their quality was employed and it can be seen that element of lowest quality are minimal. Most of the elements have very high quality in the range of 0.3-1. Hence, the mesh is of acceptable quality. The meshed model is shown in image below:

The simulation is then run and results are obtained.

Results:

Total deformation for the Wheel and track at different bearing load.

S.No. Time [s] Minimum [mm] Maximum [mm] Average [mm]

1. 5. 0. 1001.5 369.47 (50,000 N)
2. 5. 5.6843e-014 1001.3 369.42 (10,000 N)

Equivalent Stress for the Wheel and track at different bearing load.

S.No Time [s] Minimum [Mpa] Maximum [Mpa] Average [Mpa]

1. 5. 2.2646e-009 395.45 5.3307 (50,000 N)
2. 5. 4.1619e-010 90.748 1.1106 (10,000 N)

Life for the Wheel and track at different bearing load.

S.No Minimum [Cycles] Maximum [Cycles]

1. 2801.3 1e6 (50,000 N)
2. 7.4376e5 1e6 (10,000 N)

Case 2:

For Case 2, Static Structural Analysis is carried out on Rail wheel and Track. The bearing load is 10,000 N and the analysis is carried out on Ansys Workbench. And the total deformation from user defined result is obtained.

Results:

Total deformation of the 2 cases are compared first.

S.No. Time [s] Minimum [mm] Maximum [mm] Average [mm]

1 5. 5.6843e-014 1001.3 369.42

2. 5. -1.6672e-002 9.4901e-003 -1.5644e-004(User defined)

The plot for the total deformation obtained from the user defined results of the Rail wheel and track is as plotted and is shown in the figure given below:

Conclusion:

The Analysis was run succesfully, within the limits of the academic license, the simulation for the 2 cases were examined.

On comparison of the life of both the model in 2 cases, life of Rail wheel and track on applying a bearng load of 50,000 N is way less (i.e 2801.3 Cycle) than that on applying a load of 10,000 N (i.e 7.4376e5)