Structural integrity analysis of a tram-way: load spectra and material damage

Transportation authorities have to support high costs for track maintenance due to the wear of the rails and to crack generation at some particular points along the line. To set up the planning of the maintenance and inspection operations, a predictive approach could be very useful. Moreover, such an approach could help tramcar designers to design tramcars less aggressive towards the line. This paper deals with a numerical approach for the prediction of damage phenomena on tramline rails. In order to be able to foresee maintenance and inspection intervals, both wear and ratchetting analyses are carried out on the basis of load spectra that were determined with a validated multi-body tramcar model. Although the damage analysis is focused on a specific case (one single curve with a radius of 50 m), the approach is very general thus allowing to be used for assessing tramcar design.