Calculations of jointed rails and continiuously welded rails on railway by finite element methods

Railway transportation has an important role on passenger and freight transportation. Railways have a great advantage on carrying of the huge amount of freights and passengers with their high speeds. The developed or developing countries give an importance to railways because of its numerous advantages. On the other hand it is very important for railway organizations to enable railway tracks to be in operation during the year effectively and efficiently. Railway organizations mostly prefer traditional railway superstructure and substructure system consisting of sub-ballast, ballast, sleepers, rails and fasteners. The rails, fasteners and ballast layer consist of railway superstructure, on the other hand the subgrade and sub-ballast layers consist of substructure. The rail elements are very important facing with the train loads and transmitting these loads to the following structures. The laying, fixing and connecting of rails require a sensitive work during the construction and maintenance processes. Railway organizations connect the rails in two ways which are called as joint and weld techniques. The railway tracks are named as Jointed Rails (JR) and Continuously Welded Rails (CWR) on the base of their connection types. In this paper, a study was performed to measure the rails' performance under the thermal effects. For this purpose, some numerical calculations were realized and in parallel a finite element model is constituted by using a finite element methods' (FEM) techniques to solve some complex problems of railway tracks under the thermal force effects. On the base of developed railway track FEM modal, the dilatation joints, the length of rails, the rail-sleeper-fastener and ballast interaction was evaluate and some conclusions were made.