International Journal of Railway Research

Currently there is a high demand of heavy haul and high speed trains worldwide. With this demand the track, especially fastening system, suffers a lot and is experiencing unexplainable failures which reduce the life of the entire track. Although the numerous researches have been conducted on fastening system for different reasons (many concentrated on one component), few researches have been conducted on effect of train speed and axle load on all component of the fastening systems. In this research an ANSYS Software is used to numerically analyze the effect of speed and axle load for heavy haul on fastening system components. In this research different speeds and axle loads are considered. It is shown that by increasing the ratio the deformation increases at high rate compared with incremental of speed. The results show that when the lateral to vertical load ratio increases from 0.1 to 0.5, by considering the speed of 100 km/h for 25t axle load, the rail increases 299.5%, railpad 115.5%, abrasion plate 69.1%, rail clip 162.1%, bolt 117.4 %, shoulder 223.8% and top of the sleeper 55.1 %. It is also shown that increasing the speed from 80km/h to 160km/h the deformations, in all fastening system components, increases to an average of 32%. Increase of axle load from 25t to 40t causes the deformations to increase up to 13% compared to the increase of speed. This means that the increase of axle load has more effect than increasing the speed. The results are expected to add on more understanding of the mechanical behavior of fastening system when subjected to different loading scenario.