Failure Analysis and Design Recommendations were Performed on a Cracked Monorail Guideway.
Cracks had occurred in the running surface of the Newark International Airport monorail guideway. Some of these cracks occurred in butt welded sections of the guideway, while others in the plate surface well away from any welds. Due to the cyclic nature of the loading from the continuous passage of the monorail tires, fatigue cracking was the suspected mode of failure. We were asked to analyze the guideway and determine the stresses in the typical areas of cracking.
The investigated areas consisted of three configurations: Continuous plate, Gapped plates (free edge), and Butt welded plates. Three different finite element models were constructed to represent each of the typical configurations. For each, critical loading conditions were identified. All stresses were found to be significantly over the design allowable. We subsequently proposed design recommendations.
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O’Donnell Consulting Performs Design, Analysis and Weld Troubleshooting on Equipment to Codes including AWS, API and AAR
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