Fatigue Life Evaluation of Diesel Locomotive Car body Considering Camber Effect

캠버를 고려한 디젤기관차 차체 피로수명평가

Camber with positive deflection is one of the very important design parameters in the manufacture of railway coach. Positive camber is defined as concave shape such as an arch and it increases the strength of structure remarkably. But during the operation of a structure, the positive camber turns into negative camber and it loses the strength of structure. Therefore we should consider the camber effect when we evaluate the fatigue strength of negative cambered structure. For this purpose, we made a model of negative cambered locomotive car body and performed structural analysis and also we measured the dynamic loads at critical points during commercial line operation. Fatigue strength of locomotive was calculated by applying Miner's damage accumulation rule. Fatigue strength of the two locomotives which have different camber were compared to find out the effect of camber on dynamic load amplitude. We found that the more negative camber a locomotive had, the shorter fatigue strength obtained.