PSI - Issue 19

Anne Coulon et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 19 (2019) 665–673 Anne Coulon/ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000–000

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Keywords: Remaining life, railway transportation, asset durability, extend service life, digital and experimental operational analysis.

1. Introduction

Using its expertise in fatigue analysis, VibraTec has developed an approach to evaluate remaining life aiming to ensure asset durability and optimize operation to extend service life. Remaining life provides visibility of the structure’s future life to anticipate difficulties and guarantee long-term quality of service. Analysis of this parameter is an important part of asset management for structures designed to last for decades, like railway transportation. The approach is then applied to urban car bodies for railway transportation. Rolling stock maintenance, renovation and/or replacement costs are major issues for their owners. Indeed, remaining life studies are essential to make the right decisions in terms of sustainable development and investment for rolling stock owners.

Nomenclature nom T Nominal life nom F Nominal load act F Actual load

nom lim,  Nominal strength limit act lim,  Actual strength limit nom max,  Maximal nominal stress ref 

Reference acceleration cycle range Test acceleration cycle range Test number of acceleration cycles

i 

i N eq N

Equivalent test number of acceleration cycles

2. Methodology

The development process of a new product can be synthetized using a V-Model as presented in Fig. 1. The remaining life methodology developed by VibraTec is based on the same process.

Designer requirements Nominal life: nom T Nominal load: nom F

Acceptance testing Operating loads Actual load: act F

Design and production

nom max, 

nom lim,  ?

Design margin:

≤

act lim, 

nom lim,  ?

Quality of fabrication:

≤

Fig. 1. Remaining life methodology presented in a product development V-Model