Fatigue life investigation of UIC 54 rail profile for high speed rail

Abstract

This study is to investigate the fatigue life of high speed rail in Malaysia. This paper describes about the experimental and simulation analysis investigation on fatigue life of rail profile UIC 54 using bulk specimen according to ASTM E 466-15 standard. The Fatigue life testing was performed in the fatigue testing machine (Instron 8800) 100 kN. Meanwhile, the fatigue life analysis was performed in ANSYS Workbench 14.5. Furthermore, the stress levels for experimental testing were applied as 16.7%, 25%, 35%, 50%, 58.3%, 66.77% and 75% with machine frequency of 20 Hz. Apart from that, the total fatigue life cycles for rail profile UIC 54 were acquired from both experimental and simulation. The fatigue life S-N curves were plotted and validated with the results of the simulation analysis with experimental results.