Fracture Mechanics Modeling of Pre-stressed Concrete Sleepers Crack Propagation in High-Speed Heavy-Haul Railways

Pre-stressed mono-block concrete sleepers are one of the most widely used types of concrete sleepers in high-speed heavy-haul railways. These sleepers have the capacity of bearing heavy axial wheels load at high speeds simultaneously. Sleepers used in high-speed heavy-haul railways can carry up to 30 tons of axial wheel loading at the speed of 200 km/hr. The sleepers used in high-speed heavy-haul are made of pre-stressed concrete. In this paper, crack propagation of mode I in pre-stressed concrete sleepers for heavy-haul high-speed lines, is simulated by fracture mechanics. The plastic damage model is used to analyze parameters of fracture mechanics in finite element software ABAQUS. This model investigates non-linear damage growth in concrete (NLFM). A positive three-point bending load is applied to the rail seat of the sleeper numerical model with 6 different crack lengths (starting zero and 5 mm from to 45 mm in increments of 10mm and a width of 8 mm). Damage growth, crack length and crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) are calculated in this study. The results for damage shapes show that the fracture starts from the notch place and continues as bending damage in the line with the primary notch, and then crack bifurcation and the ultimate failure occurs eventually. This analysis shows that the structural behavior of pre-stressed concrete sleepers using fracture mechanics model, simply can be predicted using damage growth, crack length and CMOD.