International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (4.

3) (2018) 147-151

International Journal of Engineering & Technology

Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET

Research paper

Study of the Effect of Adapter Design on the Load Distribution

in the Bearing Units of Freight Cars
Martynov I. E.1, Trufanova A.V.1, Petukhov V.M.1, Ischenco V.M.2, Kladko N.S.1*
1
Ukrainian State University of Railway Transport
2
State University of Infrastructure and Technologies
*Corresponding author E-mail:[email protected]

Abstract

The possibility of increasing the service life of 18-100 three-piece bogies by using taper bearing units with different types of adapters is
considered in the article. The main task is the need to increase the longevity of the running parts of freight cars by reducing their dynamic
loading. The solution of this problem is possible by improving the axle boxes. To determine possible design solutions, an analysis was
made of modern domestic and foreign designs of bogies using bearing assemblies with adapters and three types of adapters with the
highest quality indicators, namely the half-box of the 18-7020 bogie, adapter with elastic packing and adapter of the 18-4129 bogie.
Three models of adapters were investigated using the finite-elements method, which, in accordance with reported manufacturer’s data,
have high reliability index and can provide equal load distribution between bearing systems rollers. The results of mathematical simula-
tion suggest that the forces applied to the bearing systems rollers largely depend on the adapter design. Furthermore, the st udied adapter
designs are not acceptable and require further designing.

Keywords: Adapter, Bearing Unit, Bogie, Roller, Radial Loading, Service Life,

1. Introduction 2. The Analysis of Researches and Publica-

tions
The main task of the railway transport is uninterrupted delivery of
cargo and passengers with the maximum speed, minimal cost of The design of a three-piece bogie of model 18-100, which has
transport and providing absolute safety in operation. Therefore, been used in the freight cars since 1950s, had unsatisfactory dy-
the railway stock which is used for transportation must have im- namical characteristic (especially in empty cars.) The constructive
proved technical and economic parameters, considerable strength, arrangement of interaction between the bogie solebar and the bear-
minimum metal intensity, create a minimum impact on the track ing boxes of the wheel pair is extremely unsuccessful. The reason
superstructure. But the crucial task is providing increased service of it is the fact that a large not spring-suspended weight rests di-
life of both cars as a whole and their separated units. rectly on the axle box housing and rigidly transfers all kinds of
Unfortunately, most of the car designs being used at the Ukrainian static and dynamic loads to the axle bearings. Therefore wearing
railways today are out-of-date and old. Last fundamentally new of axle box housing, pedestal jaw opening of the bogie solebar and
technical solution concerning design features of freight cars were the appearance of large gaps are unavoidable during the operation.
taken back in 1970s. The inadequate financing resulted in deliver- When the car moves, it causes additional vibration of bogies, loz-
ing extremely small number of newly constructed cars. As a result, enging of bogie solebars, overloading of a box, which can lead to
the service life of the cars in operation was prolonged repeatedly. an irregular load on the axle box body, skewing of axle bearing
The middle age of a multipurpose gondola car is 24 years, the rings and other malfunctions [1].
normative lifetime being 22 years. It leads to the situation when Accordingly, in case of operational skewing of the rings, the con-
every car of Ukrzalyiznytsya rolling stock on average 3.5 times a tact pressure is distributed along the raceways unevenly [2]. The
year is sent for current (unplanned) repair with uncoupling, that combined (radial and axial) loads of the axle box influence signif-
leads to failure of about 720 cars every day. icantly the kinematics and dynamics of its elements: along the
One of the most important elements of the freight car design is contact line of the rollers with the raceways of the bearing rings,
axle boxes with roller bearings. As the long experience of operat- the radial load concentration appears due to the non-alignment of
ing freight cars proves, it is the inadequate reliability of axle boxes the rings, and along the ends of the rollers which contact the sides
that led to 2066 car uncoupling accidents with moving trains in of the rings appear significant axial friction forces [3-5]. It leads to
1995-2017. the uneven distribution of the load both between the rollers in
bearings and along generatric lines of rollers. At such conditions
of this load perception the largest voltage values appear at the
ends of generatric lines of a roller [6]. As a result, the premature
rolling body destruction happens followed by significant decrease
of the service life of axle bearings.
Copyright © 2018 Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
148 International Journal of Engineering & Technology

The existing method of determination of equivalent load which is 5. Study of the Effect of Adapter Design on the
applied to the axle box does not take into account the specific
features of load transmission and distribution, operation condi- Load Distribution in the Bearing Units
tions of freight cars, as well as the freight car type and the specific
features of its construction. For example, the fundamentals of the High labour intensity and prime cost of full-scale experiment, as
life prediction theory for rolling bearing were proposed by W. well as the necessity to introduce sophisticated technology in the
Weibull [7] in 1939 and were further developed in A. Palmgren`s maximum tight schedule led to creating design-automation system
and G. Lundberg`s [8] researches. However, the results of using (CAD).
this theory for cylindrical axle box bearings for railway vehicles It is noteworthy that any calculation is based on the calculation
differ significantly from the operation data. For instance, accord- model, which combines the geometry of structure and loads to
ing to [9], the average service life of bearings must exceed 40 which this structure is exposed. When a calculation model of
years, but in fact it is not more than 10 years [10]. The service life complex structure is created, its shape is somewhat idealized,
of rolling bearings depends on the size of contact stress, which while the degree of idealization influence on the reliability of cal-
appear in the contact area of rollers and bearing race calculates by culation results. In our case it was important to define the load
the following formula: distribution between bearing unit rollers to determine service the
life of bearings.
p The finite elements method (FEM) was used to solve the problem.
C 
L10    (1) In order to investigate the load distribution between the bearing
P unit rollers, three adapters from the construction rank were chosen,
namely adapter of (half-box) 18-7020 bogie (Fig. 1) adapter with
Where C – dynamic load capacity, kN, P – equivalent dynamic an AdapterPlus elastic packing (Fig. 2) and adapter with herring-
load, kN, p –index which is chosen depending on the bearing type. bone plates of 18-4129 bogie (Fig. 3)

It is worth mentioning that considering issues of increasing the

service life of axle bearings, the main attention has been paid di-
rectly to improvement of the bearing design and production tech-
nology. The issues of optimization of the axle box housing design
for providing of equal load distribution have not been given suffi-
cient attention.

3. Problem Statement
Many car producers have developed a number of new generation
bogies which are characterized with specific design and reliability
to improve the reliability of driving gears of freight cars in general,
and axle boxes with rolling bearings [11-13].
The bearing unit is one of the key units which are upgraded in new
generation bogies. Using the double-row bearings with taper roll- Fig. 1: Half-box of the 18-7020 bogie
ers of cassette model is considered to be promising.
The specific feature of a cassette bearing unit is using an adapter
which acts as a transmission medium between the bogie solebar
and bearings and is used instead of the axle box housing in 18-100
bogies.
The leading world manufacturers producing taper bearing units
offer a great number of adapters, for example, the adapter with an
elastic medium which is used in 18-194-1 bogies. The specific
feature of this adapter is using the polyurethane elastic insert,
which installed into the adapter and functions as a support for the
bogie solebar [14].
An adapter with herringbone plates which are multi-layer V-
shaped elastic elements through which the solebar is supported on
the bearing unit adapter is used in the 18-4129 bogie [15].
Azovgazmash PJSC proposed a bogie [16] in which the wheel pair
and solebar are connected with polyurethane and metal spring sets
consisting of two parallelogram-shaped shock absorbers.
However, in spite of variety of adapter designs, the question is still
Fig. 2: AdapterPlus adapter with elastic packing
to be considered: what adapter design would be the most favorable
for providing equal load distribution between rollers in the axle
bearings.

4. The purpose of the Study

The purpose of the study is building simulation models of axle
box adapter of freight cars, analysis of the stress strain behavior of
the latter to find the optimal designs.
International Journal of Engineering & Technology 149

The elastic elements which model rollers were installed radially.

The rigidity of the element is equal to the rigidity of the roller. The
number of elements corresponds to the number of rollers in the
bearing.
The finite elements Combin37 were used for rollers modeling.
Combin37 elements were placed between the adapter and the out-
er bearing ring. The element arrangement is shown in Fig. 5, at the
example of a half-box. Contact elements for all three types of
adapters were designed similarly.

Fig.3 : Adapter of the 18-4129 bogie

At the first stage of the study, a geometric model of the adapter

was constructed using the ANSYS preprocessor according to the
dimensions of real adapters, taking into account the main features
of the construction, namely:
 recesses in the middle part and along the edges (places
where rollers in the bearing are missing) Fig. 5: The arrangement of elastic elements
 geometric lugs in the upper part of the frame, designed
to absorb the vertical load and to provide its distribution between Simulation of the stress-strain behavior of a bearing unit, which
the rollers; was made on the basis of the developed 3D models for all three
 fins in the side of the adapter, designed to fix it between adapters, enabled to study the radial load distribution the between
the side jaws of the solebar and provide the accommodation of rollers in these constructions. The bearings in the adapters were
horizontal loads. loaded with radial load, taking into account the vertical movement
The constructed model is divided into finite elements of rather coefficient. The value of the normal force applied from the axis to
simple shape. Solid92 10-piece finite elements of the tetrahedral the rails was assumed to be 23.5 tf/axis for the half-box of 18-
type were used to model the volumes of solid adapter bodies. The 7020 bogie, and 25 tf/axis for the adapter with an AdapterPlus
element is defined by ten nodes that have three degrees of freedom elastic packing and the adapter which is used in 18-4129 bogies.
in each node: moving in the direction of the X, Y, Z axes in the The following assumptions have been taken into account in the
coordinate system of the node. Such elements are most appropriate calculations:
for modeling of machine-building constructions of relatively small  influence of longitudinal and lateral loads was ignored;
dimensions, but complicated shapes.  the inner bearing ring was assumed to be completely
The developed finite element model of the half-box consists of rigid;
41,957 finite elements and 121,728 nodes, for AdapterPlus adapter  the rigidity of the roller was taken constant;
- 37952 finite elements and 112,579 nodes, for adapter with her-  there was no friction between the adapter and the outer
ringbone plates – 49,871 finite elements and 149,613 units. Finite bearing ring;
element adapter models are shown on Fig. 4.  the adapter material worked in the elastic stage of de-
formation and had constant characteristics - the modulus of elas-
ticity of steel from which the adapter is made, is taken 2.1 ·1011 Pa,
the Poisson's coefficient is 0.3.
 the materials of the contacting bodies are homogeneous,
isotropic and ideally elastic.
During solving the set tasks, radial stress diagrams in the bearing
units for every selected adapter model have been obtained (fig. 6).

Fig. 4 : Finite element adapter models: a– half-box of the 18-7020 bogi; b–

AdapterPlus adapter with elastic packing; с– adapter of the 18-4129 bogie.

Conta174 final elements were used for the contact surface of the
outer and inner bearing rings. The contact elements have the same Fig. 6 : The diagrams of the load distribution between the rollers for all
geometric dimensions and a common set of geometric characteris- three types of adapters: a– half-box of the 18-7020 bogi; b– AdapterPlus
tics as the real volume elements associated with them. adapter with elastic packing; с– adapter of the
18-4129 bogie.
150 International Journal of Engineering & Technology

Thus, the following force distribution between bearing boxes roll- Table 1: Calculation results
ers, which are located in the loaded area, have been obtained for

Number of load-

force perceptible
load “peaks” per
force

Maximum radial
Number of radial

ed rollers in a
ers in a one row
Number of roll-
all three types of adapters. Readings have been made from the

of bearing
value, tf/axis
central rolling element, situated on the axis of symmetry of the

by roller
rolling elements.

rotation
Normal

row
Half-box of 18-7020 bogie 23.5 18 2 9 18.3

AdapterPlus Adapter 25 24 1 7 19.2

Adapter of 18-4129 bogie 25 24 2 11 14.8

Fig. 7 : Radial loading distribution between the rollers of the bearing unit The load diagram between rollers of the bearing unit which is
which is used together with the half-box of the 18-7020 bogie. installed with an adapter used at 18-4129 bogies, has the most
favourable load distribution. It should be noted that the rollers in
this construction have also two load peaks of about 14.8 kN.

6. Conclusion
In Following the results of the study, it may be concluded that
 installation of adapters between the bearing unit and the
bogie frame has positive effect on the load distribution between
rollers, which suggests the expediency of using it;
 a half-box and an adapter with elastic packing have
worse performance than the adapter with herringbone plates. The
main drawback of an adapter with herringbone latches is its rather
complicated design.
Fig. 8 : Radial loading distribution between the rollers of the bearing unit
 the manufacturability of the adapter design and the pos-
which is used together with adapter AdapterPlus with elastic packing.
sibility of its integration with the typical 18-100 bogie would be
an additional criterion in choosing the optimal adapter design.

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