The Insulated Rail Joint Project

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• The Insulated Rail Joint Project
• Seth Lambrecht and Heike Lohse-Busch
• Advisor Dr. Dillard and Dr. Plaut
• The goal of this project is to design an
  improved insulated rail joint to replace the
  existing joints. The service life of current
  joints is approximately 10 of that of adjoining
  rail, our goal is to design a joint that will
  have a service life five times longer than the
  existing joint. To achieve this we intend to use
  an angled cut instead of the current cut
  perpendicular to the rail. This geometry will
  reduce the stresses in the adhesives as well as
  vertical deflection and bending moments in the
  joint. The design of this will require our
  extensive knowledge of solid mechanics regarding
  static and dynamic wheel loading. In addition
  the analysis and simulation will require
  programming in Mathematica and ABAQUS.

• Executive Summary Our project includes the
  static and dynamic analysis of the joint.
• Statically, we will determine the optimal cut
  angle and rail tip geometry through design of
  experiments using finite element analysis models
  in ABAQUS.
• The results we be validated by comparison to
  analytical beam on elastic foundation analysis
  using the Rayleigh-Ritz method performed in
  Mathematica.
• Dynamically, we will optimize the cut angle
  analytically using the Galerkin method with the
  beam on elastic foundation theory.
• All results will be compared to the existing
  joint to determine the most efficient cut angle
  and rail tip geometry.