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Fatigue Life Estimation Of Modified Railroad Bearing Adapters For Onboard Monitoring Applications, Alexis Trevino, Arturo A. Fuentes, Constantine Tarawneh, Joseph Montalvo

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a study of the fatigue life (i.e. number of stress cycles before failure) of Class K cast iron conventional and modified railroad bearing adapters for onboard monitoring applications under different operational conditions based on experimentally validated Finite Element Analysis (FEA) stress results. Currently, freight railcars rely heavily on wayside hot-box detectors (HBDs) at strategic intervals to record bearing cup temperatures as the train passes at specified velocities. Hence, most temperature measurements are limited to certain physical railroad locations. This limitation gave way for an optimized sensor that could potentially deliver significant insight on continuous bearing temperature conditions. …