When special trackwork contact surfaces (such as manganese-steel turnout frogs) become worn and damaged, they can be repaired to extend their lifetime, but current repair methods typically cannot return these surfaces to their original durability. Since worn or damaged frogs in freight and shared corridors have a detrimental effect on ride quality and increase life cycle costs, improved repair processes can extend the service life of frogs and improve the safety and efficiency of rail operations. In this project, EWI developed a new flux-cored arc welding (FCAW) procedure to repair manganese frogs. When EWI tested a repaired frog in simulated revenue service conditions at the Transportation Technology Center, the test results show a significant improvement in the durability of the repair as compared to traditional repair methods. Future work plans include revenue service trials, as well as refinements to weld procedures and materials.
EWI completed research and testing of an automated weld repair process for austenitic manganese steel railroad frogs. This report covers the second of...
Extensive work applying fatigue and fracture mechanics, as well as an ANSYS coarse model to sub-model computational analysis, was performed to predict...
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United States Department of Transportation
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