STABILITY ANALYSIS FOR CONTINUOUS WELDED RAIL TRACKS USING THEIR RELATION OF LOAD AND DEFORMATION

The continuous welded rail (CWR) track is a new type of structures applied to railway engineering in modern track transportation. The stability analysis of CWR track plays an important role in theory and practice, and it is the key technique for CWR track transportation. In order to develop the track transportation, many researchers from different countries are engaging in the stability analysis of CWR track in the world, and some experiments and theoretical work have already performed for obtaining the important technique. In the paper, based on the load-deformation relation, the stability of CWR track is investigated and the expression of temperature stress in CWR track is derived for analyzing the mechanical performance of the CWR track. Inputting different deformation wavelengths, the minimum temperature loading of CWR track is obtained by applying the optimization method. The numerical examples are presented through the proposed mechanical model, and their results are compared with those obtained through the method of the rail initial deformation wavelength unequal to the rail elastic distortion wavelength, with the maximum difference being less than . The good agreement between them shows that the proposed analytical technique is an effective method for evaluating stresses in CWR track.