TC24 Integrity of Railway Structures

TC24 UpDates

Chairman

Prof. R. Smith

Imperial College, London.

Chairman

Dr. U. Zerbst ()

GKSS, Geesthacht.
Contact E-mails: uwe.zerbst@gkss.de


TC24 UPDATE 2006

A Special Meeting on “Damage Tolerance of Railway Axles” has been held at GKSS Research Centre Geesthacht, from 2 February to 3 February 2005. The meeting has been attended by 34 people from different countries .

Activity and presentations After an approval of the minutes of the previous meetings and the Terms of References several technical presentations have been held in 2 sessions. In particular the presentations have been :
o R.A. Smith (Imperial College, London): Railway axles: new pressures cause an old problem to resurface
o J. Benyon (AEAT Rail)
o S. Beretta & M. Carboni (Politecnico di Milano, Milan): Propagation lifetime of railway axles: experiments and probabilistic approach
o S. Beretta, M. Carboni (Politecnico di Milano, Milan) :A comparison of crack evolution between plane and rotating bending
o I. Cerny (SVUM, Praha): Fracture Mechanics Activitiesfor Railway Axles in Czech Republic
o L. Josefson (Chalmers University, Göteburg): Design and Materials for Railway Axles in Sweden
o U. Zerbst (GKSS Research Centre, Geesthacht): Quantitative requirements on non-destructive testing of railway axles based on fracture mechanics.

The presentations were followed by lively discussions that highlighted the topics that need to be investigated for establishing correctly propagation lifetimes and inspection intervals of railway axles. At the end of the presentations, a brief update of the current research projects on axles (UK Axle, DEUFRAKO, WIDEM) was made.

Election of Chairmen At the end of the first technical session, Schwalbe introduces the discussion for a new election of TC24 Chairmen since himself is going to retire in April and Ringsberg has left the business of railways (he is now employed by Volvo). In particular Schwalbe introduces two candidates: Prof. R. Smith (Imperial College, London) and Dr. U. Zerbst (GKSS, Geesthacht). After a brief discussion, R. Smith and U. Zerbst have been unanimously elected as the new chairmen for TC24.

Future actions After ICF11 where a Railway Session will be held, the next activity of TC24 to be planned for Fall 2006 is the pubblication of a state-of-the art paper summarizing the facts and the open points in the life calculation of railway axles.

TC24 UPDATE 2004

In April 2003 a two-day workshop for discussing the application of structural integrity concepts to railway components have been organised and hosted by K.H. Schwalbe and Uwe Zerbst at GKSS. The meeting had 31 participants from 9 European countries and Japan: There have been 15 technical presentations which stimulated a very lively discussion with a very nice atmosphere (see photo).
In particular, the majority of the presentations have been submitted in an extended written version to a Special Issue of Engineering Fracture Mechanics (Guest Editors: K.H. Schwalbe & U. Zerbst) which is due to appear in 2004.

Concerning possibilities for other events and future activities, results of the final discussion were:
  1. It was decided to propose the constitution of a new technical committee to ESIS Council:
    2. This was approved at he Seville Council meeting and the new body was given the name TC24;
  2. A second meeting in Fall autumn of 2003 in Geesthacht in order to discuss the Terms of Reference of TC 24 list of structural integrity issues;
  3. Technical papers devoted to advertise structural integrity concepts among railway engineers.
This second meeting was hosted again by K.H. Schwalbe (GKSS, Geesthacht) on 27th November 2003. After a welcome to TC24 participants, the minutes of the first meeting were approved and the two TC24 co-chairmen were elected in person of K.H. Schwalbe (GKSS, Germany) and J. Ringsberg (Chalmers University, Sweden).
After a discussion, consensus was reached about the following points:
  1. The Terms of Reference proposed by R. Allen were adopted;
  2. It is necessary to improve contact with 'railway forums' such as Wheelset Congress and CM2003;
  3. The TC24 should develop technical consensus on specific items by producing technical recommendations that could then be adopted by industry and/or by regulation bodies such as UIC.
  4. The next meeting will be in Milan after the special railway issue has appeared.
A session with 8 original technical presentations was then held.
Minutes of the first meeting (Workshop on the Application of Fracture Mechanics to Railway Components).