Design and performance evaluation of railway sleeper baseplate hold-down system for timber sleeper elastic fasteners

The adoption of timber sleeper elastic fasteners to mitigate rail-rollover derailments in the North American freight network has led to the failure of spikes which, in-turn, have caused at least 13 derailments in past two decades. Previous spike-failure investigations have determined that the loss of friction at the plate-sleeper interface (caused by the wave action of the rail) is a driving factor of these failures because it causes additional load (i.e., lateral and especially longitudinal) to transfer to the spikes, thus triggering the spike stress levels to exceed their endurance limit. Previous studies have also identified that a feasible mitigation method is the application of a vertical hold-down force to the plate, thus reducing the spike stress (e.g., a 4.5 kN (1,000 lbs.) hold-down load per spike can lead to a 70% reduction in spike stresses). This load has historically been applied using spring washers with screw spikes. However, there are currently no specifications (performance or design) for these spring washers. This has in turn led to insufficiently resilient washers being installed at load magnitudes that exceed the timber strength which has, in-turn, caused a reduction of hold-down force over time and a loss of benefit of the system. In response to this, a review of the limitations of the systems and a suite of laboratory experiments have been executed to help establish recommendations for a spring for this application. The laboratory experiments characterized the static performance (i.e., resiliency) of various spring washers as well as the time-dependent behavior of the sub-system (i.e., stress relaxation of the sleeper-screw spike-washer). Results of this work are intended to aid the railroad industry in the development of hold-down method recommendations.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Mechanical Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Khan, Rahat Mahmud

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dunn, Alison C.
• Dersch, Marcus S.

• Railway Engineering
• Timber Sleeper
• Elastic Fastener
• Tie Plate
• Hold-down Method
• Spring Washer
• Stress Relaxation.

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Rahat Mahmud Khan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122180

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F122180