Preliminary Development of the Mechanical-Empirical Based Wearing Model for the Conductor Rail in the Medium Capacity Transit System

Abstract

In the conductor rail system cyclic loadings by train will make wear on the conductor rail and wear plate over time Generally there are three types of the performance model which are empirical mechanical and mechanical-empirical (M-E) model that mostly use to describe the wear However there is no performance model based on the M-E approach for the conductor rail system at present Therefore there is an urgent need to develop the M-E based wearing deterioration model which allow to consider the in-service condition of the conductor rail and wear plate There are three types of data collected to establish M-E based wear model for the conductor rail system in the MCTS First was the component specifications of the wear plate conductor and collector shoe Second was the data related to the service condition such as train speed electric current and vibration of the collector shoe Last was the inspection data of the wear plate and conductor rail There were two proposed M-E based wear model one for wear plate and the other for conductor rail The parameters in the model include normal load speed hardness and electric current The result of the M-E based wear model for wear plate showed that the higher the wear level the lower the percent error For conductor rail the percent errors were irrelevant to wear level and are stable below 16%

Date of Award	2018 Jul 30
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shih-Hsien Yang (Supervisor)