Study on Mechanical Performances and Fatigue Life of the Compensation Ropes in High-Speed Railway Contact Network

The compensation rope is a special steel wire rope used as a driving component in the ratchet device. The compensation rope will endure severe random cycling loading during service time, which will lead to fatigue failures and catastrophic disasters. Experimental studies are hard to mimic the practical working conditions and time consuming, therefore, this study establishes a finite element model of the compensation rope and simulates the stress distribution under axial tensile and bending loads. Fatigue life is analysed based on both stress and strain fatigue theories under alternating tensile and bending loads. The results indicate that under axial tensile loads, the stress in the outermost wires of the core strands of the compensation rope is the largest, with the minimum fatigue life. As the stress ratio of the alternating tensile load increases, the fatigue life also improves due to smaller stress amplitudes. Under the conditions of bending loads, the outermost wires of the outermost strands experience the largest stress and the minimum fatigue life. As the amplitude of the bending load increases, the fatigue life decreases rapidly.