Engineering Commons^™

Structural optimisation of composite railway sleeper is becoming an important area of research to effectively use composite materials and minimising their manufacturing costs. This study used the finite element approach to structurally optimise a composite sleeper for a mainline railway track and evaluate their performance. Strand7 finite element simulation is executed to achieve this goal. This study presents the optimised shape of a sleeper which requires only one-third volume to that of a standard rectangular sleeper. The performance of the optimised sleeper is determined in a high and low stiffness support foundation and the results obtained from this analysis are …