Fatigue life assessment of bogie frames in high-speed railway vehicles considering gear meshing

Abstract Railway welded bogie is usually subjected to extremely complex fatigue loads, producing huge failure hazard. However, only external excitations from the wheel-rail system are considered when assessing the fatigue performance by most of the standards. Therefore, a novel approach for assessing the lifetime of a powered bogie frame considering internal excitation was proposed in this paper. To achieve this, a modified torsional vibration model considering gear meshing was first established. The calculated results were then input into a rigid-flexible coupled vehicle dynamic model to estimate the dynamic response and hence the cumulative damage was determined. This approach was applied to assess the lifetime of a weld polished bogie frame. The results indicate that internal excitation should be considered to determine the service lifetime.