Study of the lifecycle of rubber suspension elements for optimised maintenance and safe dynamic behaviour
Résumé
Transport industry and, more specifically, railway industry, is confronted with a permanent need of improvement of its products. The competitiveness of rolling stock does not come only from low-cost production, but also from wise-calculated lifecycle costs. Nowadays, many contracts for railway operators include not only rolling stock, but also its maintenance services throughout its lifetime, which may reach up to 30% of global costs. Hence, deep knowledge about the system’s ageing is a strong asset to ensure a good performance, both on quality of service and financial costs. Rubber parts are widely used in railway technology because of their mechanical properties, providing both stiffness and, to a certain extent, additional damping and vibration filtering. Unlike metallic parts, whose mechanical properties remain relatively stable, rubber’s behaviour can change throughout a lifecycle, due to service loads and environmental influence. Such changes might have an impact on the system’s overall behaviour and lead to undesirable scenarii. For a given bogie model, we seek to estimate the stiffness variation of some rubber parts, which are deemed critical for safe operation.