A facility is proposed in this paper to apply a selective carburizing process to the lateral faces of a railways´ head, aiming to increase its carbon content and to decrease the friction coefficient in case that the flange of the railway car wheel gets in contact with the rail during turning. Such a treatment would reduce the energy that is lost during the turning maneuvers performed by the vehicle, further improving the energy efficiency of the railway car. The facility consists of a furnace, which should be set next to the rails´ hot-rolling facility, in order to use the available enthalpy. The proposed furnace is equipped with what is necessary to avoid the decarbonization of the remaining rail material, based upon batteries of oxy-acetylene burners that are installed at the bottom of the furnace, on the opposite side to the carburizing surface. An experimental facility is necessary to validate the operational principles for the equipment proposed in this paper. On the other hand, a study should also be carried out to assess the effect of any rail welding process on the carburized surfaces.
Vehicle’s components damage
(2020)
The failure of vehicle’s suspension components has contributed to road crashes, while their defective operation can deteriorate the fuel efficiency of the vehicles. In this context, and when compared with solid cargo transporters, the road tankers would tend to produce larger roll forces during turning, as the curved shape of the liquid cargo container, shifts upwards the centre of gravity of the cargo. With reference to a rectangular cargo container representing the solid cargo situation, the increase in the position due to elliptical and circular tank shapes, can attain a value of 17% (100% fill, circular tank). In this study, experimental results comparing the lateral load transfer due to solid and liquid cargoes, indicate that the average force increase on the vehicle’s load-receiver side due to a liquid cargo, is 4.3%. To analyse the fullscale situation of both situations, that is, the higher position of the centre of gravity and the shifting of the liquid cargo, a simplified model is developed. The outputs from such a model when subjected to realistic operating conditions (speed
and turning radius), suggest that the higher position of the centre of gravity due to using a non-rectangular cargo container generates an average force increase of 4.9% on the side receiving the load transfer. The incorporation of the effect of the liquid cargo, through the simple pendulum analogy, suggests that such an average increases to 6.76%, with a maximum of 8.35% in the case of the elliptical tank at 75% fill level. It is found that the average liquid cargo effect is 5.44%, which should be compared with the 4.3% of the experiments. Road tankers components would thus have a relatively shorter load cycle life than those of the solid cargo trucks.