Abstract
Railway bogie frames are commonly constructed by welding several components. For a frame design, it is vital that all its welded joints have satisfactory strength and durability during their service life. This paper focuses on as-weld joints. The objectives include clarifying the influence of experimental stress assessment methods and developing analytical tools which are applicable to the design of as-weld joints in bogie frames. Static load tests were conducted on cruciform as-weld joints and machined test specimens using three different strain gauge attachment positions; finite element analyses (FEA) were performed. The results clarified that a new stress assessment method where the edge of strain gauge is attached at the weld toe shows the smallest deviation and little dependency on toe curvature radius variations. This suggests that the edge type strain gauge attachment is the best out of the three methods for stress assessment of as-weld joints. Moreover, the analytical stresses calculated from the FEA results agreed well with the experiments using the displacement differences corresponding to the strain gauge length. Appropriate FEA model shape and mesh size for the weld toes are proposed to calculate the edge type gauge stresses for the design of as-weld joints in bogie frames.
