RIS ID
18009
Abstract
Failure mechanisms of engineering structures to various loadings are the key indicators for structural engineers to design and predict the behaviours of such structures. However, the undetermined post-failure mechanisms are of major concern after the structural collapse, due to excessive loading. The residual load-carrying capacity yields the safety allowance to public domain, in order to escape from the incident. In railway practice, the concrete sleepers tend to be subjecting hogging or negative moment at the mid-span, resulting in the negative bending of the sleeper and associated gauge rail rotation. Although the concrete sleeper fails, it still tends to hold the rail gauges. Therefore, it is essential to understand into the behaviours after failure of the concrete sleeper. This paper elucidates the post-failure mechanism and the residual load-carrying capacity of railway concrete sleeper. To achieve this, Australian-manufacturer’s concrete sleeper was employed for the negative bending test in accordance with AS1085. LDVT was employed in deflection measurement at the mid-span while the inclinometers were placed in line of the rail support. The post-failure load deflection curves have been first presented here. The remaining part of the concrete sleeper was used to core for some samples. The concrete strength of 88.5MPa is found for the concrete material of this sleeper. Each prestressing wire has a proof stress of 1860 MPa. It is found that each prestressing wire restrains approximately 10kN residual load-carrying capacity of the concrete sleeper.
Publication Details
This peer-reviewed conference paper was originally published as Kaewunruen, S and Remennikov, A, Post-failure mechanism and residual load-carrying capacity of railway prestressed concrete sleeper under hogging moment, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Structural Integrity and Failure - SIF2006, 27 - 29 September 2006, Sydney, Australia, 331-336. Copyright The Institute of Materials Engineering Australasia. Original conference proceedings available here.