Thermal buckling of curved railroad tracks (Q1088475)

Previous buckling analyses of curved railroad tracks did not take into account the prebuckling lateral expansion of the rails and/or have made the simplifying assumption that the lateral resistance which the ballast exerts on the rail-tie structure is either constant or linear. In this paper, a more refined analysis is presented, which accounts for the prebuckling lateral expansions, and which uses a bilinear response for the lateral resistance, and a nonlinear response for the axial resistance. The governing equations are derived from a variational formulation. The obtained solution is exact. It was found that for curves with decreasing radius the safe temperature change, \(T_ L\), decreases. The results are compared with full scale field test results. The comparison indicates that the analytically obtained safe temperature increases, \(T_ L\), are on the safe side and thus can be used for design and maintenance purposes. To simplify the use of the obtained solution, it was evaluated numerically for a range of track parameters and the results are presented as graphs.