During the last decade, a novel methodology for wheel wear simulation has been developed in Sweden. The practical objective of this simulation procedure is to provide an integratedengineering tool to support rail vehicle design with respect to wheel wear performance and detailed understanding of wheel-rail interaction. The tool is integrated in a vehicle dynamicssimulation environment.The wear calculation is based on a set of dynamic simulations, representing the vehicle, the network, and the operating conditions. The wheel profile evolution is simulated in an iterativeprocess by adding the contribution from each simulation case and updating the profile geometry.The method is being validated against measurements by selected pilot applications. To strengthen the confidence in simulation results the scope of application should be as wide aspossible in terms of vehicle classes. The purpose of this thesis work has been to try to extend the scope of validation of this method into the light rail area, simulating the light rail vehicleA32 operating in Stockholm commuter service on the line Tvärbanan.An exhaustive study of the wear theory and previous work on wear prediction has been necessary to understand the wear prediction method proposed by KTH. The dynamicbehaviour of rail vehicles has also been deeply studied in order to understand the factors affecting wear in the wheel-rail contact.The vehicle model has been validated against previous studies of this vehicle. Furthermore new elements have been included in the model in order to better simulate the real conditionsof the vehicle.Numerous tests have been carried out in order to calibrate the wear tool and find the settings which better match the real conditions of the vehicle.Wheel and rail wear as well as profile evolution measurements were available before this work and they are compared with those results obtained from the simulations carried out.The simulated wear at the tread and flange parts of the wheel match quite well the measurements. However, the results are not so good for the middle part, since themeasurements show quite evenly distributed wear along the profile while the results from simulations show higher difference between extremes and middle part. More tests would benecessary to obtain an optimal solution.

This research puts forth an examination of the relationship between municipal planning and short line freight railroads. Methodologically, it employs a content analysis framework that explores local master plans and zoning bylaws for the presence of concepts relevant to short line railroads. A historically omitted topic, the railroads are found to be frequently omitted from plans, often conflicting with civic and recreational interests despite their increasingly efficient ability, economic and environmental, to service numerous industries. Zoning bylaws show a disfavor to these entities, and at times may exceed their authority. Moreover, they may create physical and legal limitations to new, rail-sustained industry, as well as the rehabilitation of former industrial clusters. Findings related to regulatory preemption, transportation and land use policy, corridor conversion, and shifting land use patterns are presented. Consequentially, daunting implications may resonate for both the railroad and municipalities. Recommendations encompass municipal, regional, and state policy, as well as opportunities for multi-agency collaboration, economic development initiatives, and revised regulatory structures.

This dissertation aims to study the benefit of rail grinding on service life of railroad rails, focusing on failures due to rolling contact fatigue (RCF) at the rail head. Assuming a tangent rail with one-point contact at the running surface, a finite element analysis of a full-scale wheel-rail rolling contact with a nonlinear isotropic kinematic hardening material model is performed to simulate the accumulation of residual stresses and strains in the rail head. Using rolling stress and strain results from the sixth loading cycle, in which residual stresses and strains are at their steady-state, as input, two critical plane fatigue criteria are proposed for fatigue analyses. The first fatigue criterion is the stress-based approach—namely the Findley fatigue criterion. It suggests an important role of tensile residual stresses on subsurface crack nucleation and early growth in the rail head, but applications of the criterion to the near-running-surface region are limited because of plastic deformation from wheel-rail contact. The second fatigue criterion is the strain-based approach—namely the Fatemi-Socie fatigue criterion. Contributed mainly from shear strain amplitudes and factorized by normal stress components, the criterion also predicts fatigue crack nucleation at the subsurface as a possible failure mode as well as fatigue crack nucleation at the near-surface, while maintaining its validity in both regions. A collection of fatigue test data of various types of rail steel from literature is analyzed to determine a relationship between fatigue damages and number of cycles to failure. Considering a set of wheel loads with their corresponding number of rolling passage as a loading unit (LU), optimizations of grinding schedules with genetic algorithm (GA) show that fatigue life of rail increases by varying amount when compared against that from the no-grinding case. Results show that the proposed grinding schedules, optimized with the exploratory and local-search genetic algorithms, can increase fatigue life of rail by 240 percent. The optimization framework is designed to be able to determine a set of optimal grinding schedules for different types of rail steel and different contact configurations, i.e. two-point contact occurred when cornering.

This dissertation deals with a development of a laser welded common rail with a radially attached RPS sensor of pressure. The new concept required by Bosch Diesel s.r.o. Jihlava should be more modifiable and it should be easily integrated with the engine compartment. In this dissertation I suggested a number of concepts that I further analysed, verified in appropriate software, developed, and finally narrowed the selection down to the most suitable solution, which is recommended and justified in the conclusion.

Diploma thesis discusses a design of a rail equipment that provides a rail capapility to a classic excavator. Strenght calculation using FEM method and data evaluation is included in. A concept of structure alterations is provided as a result of calculation. Evaluation of compliance with measures of rail operation is also present.

Manual investigation of railway infrastructure is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, and automating it has become a high priority for railway operators to reduce unexpected infrastructure expenditure. In this thesis, we propose a new image classification approach for classifying defect and non-defective rail joints in image data, based on previous fault detection algorithms using object detection. The rail joints model is to our knowledge a world first, with the vast majority of research into applying computer vision for rail defect detection focusing mainly on the rail tracks and sleepers. Our new image classification models are based on the widely popular Inception ResNet V2, which we fine-tune and compare against a counterpart trained using self-supervision. Additional comparisons are performed against the Faster R-CNN object detector that has had successes with rail tracks and sleepers at the Swiss Federal Railways, as well as against the novel transformer-based DETR architecture. The research has used an in-house object detection annotated dataset from the Swiss railways, recorded in the context of predictive rail maintanance, with rail joints labeled as either defective, or non-defective. Our proposed image classification approach, using either a pre-trained and then fine-tuned, or self-supervised CNN, uses the bounding boxes in a dataset originally intended for object detection, to perform an expanded crop of the images around the rail joint before feeding it to the neural network. Our new image classification approach significantly outperforms object detection neural networks for the task of classifying defective and non-defective rail joints, albeit with the requirement that the rail joint has to be identified prior to classification. Furthermore, our results suggest that the trained models classify defective joints in the test set more consistently than human rail inspectors. The results show that our proposed method can achieve practical performance on unseen data, and can practically be applied to real-life defect detection with high precision and recall, notably on the railways operated by Swiss Federal Railways, SBB CFF FFS. / Manuell inspektion av järnvägsinfrastruktur är en tids- och arbetskrävande uppgift, och automatisering av inspektionerna har på senare tid blivit mer prioriterat av järnvägsoperatörer i syfte att minska oväntade utgifter som uppkommer till följd av undermålig infrastruktur. I det här examensarbetet presenterar vi en ny bildklassificeringsmetod för att klassificera defekta och icke-defekta järnvägsskarvar i bilder tagna från diagnostiska tåg. Modelleringen av järnvägsskarvar som vi har utfört är till vår kännedom något som aldrig gjorts förut för järnvägsinfrastruktur, då majoriteten av forskning inom datorseende för inspektion av järnvägsinfrastruktur historiskt mest har fokuserat på räls och sliprar. Den nya bildklassificeringsmodellen som vi har utvecklat använder den populära arkitekturen Inception ResNet V2, som vi finjusterar och jämför med ett dito som har tränats med självövervakad inlärning. Vidare jämförelser görs mot objektigenkänningsmetoden Faster R-CNN som fungerat väl för sliprar på den schweiziska järnvägen, samt mot den nya transformer-baserade arkitekturen DETR. Forskningen har använt ett dataset annoterat för objektigenkänning från den schweiziska järnvägen, med järnvägsskarvar märkta som defekta, eller icke-defekta. Vår föreslagna bildklassificeringsmetod, med antingen en förtränad och sedan finjusterad CNN, eller en CNN tränad med sjävövervakad inlärning, använder de annoterade boxarna från datasetet för att beskära bilderna runt skarvarna, och sedan klassificera dem. Vår nya metod baserad på bildklassificering presterar väsentligt bättre än neurala nätverk för objektigenkänning, dock med kravet att järnvägsskarven måste ha identifierats i bilden före klassificering. Vidare visar våra resultat att de tränade bildklassificeringsmodellerna klassificerar defekta skarvar i test-setet mer konsekvent än mänskliga järnvägsinspektörer. Resultaten visar att vår nya metod kan användas praktiskt för att upptäcka defekter i verkligheten, med hög precision och recall i data som inte setts under träningen. Specifikt visar vi att de nya modellerna är praktiskt användbara för järnvägen som drivs av Schweiziska Federala Järnvägarna, SBB CFF FFS.

Dans le domaine de la conception de circuits sécurisés (cartes à puce) et plus particulièrement des circuits robustes aux attaques différentielles en puissance (DPA), la logique double rail apparaît comme une alternative intéressante à la logique statique CMOS. En effet, le codage associé à ce style de logique offre la possibilité d'équilibrer la consommation rendant ainsi impossible les attaques DPA. Partant de ce constat, dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes focalisés sur l'analyse des atouts et faiblesses de la logique double rail et surtout à son amélioration. Dans un premier temps, nous avons montré qu'un circuit double rail est nettement plus résistant aux attaques DPA que son homologue simple rail. Dans un deuxième temps, après une étude approfondie de l'impact de la synthèse physique sur la robustesse de la logique double rail, nous avons abouti à la conclusion qu'en présence de déséquilibres des capacités de charge, des temps de transition et des temps d'arrivée, les circuits double rail peuvent perdre leur avantage et devenir vulnérables aux attaques DPA. Cette étude a permis de définir quelques métriques de robustesse aux attaques DPA à partir desquelles nous avons clairement établi qu'une cellule double rail n'est robuste que si les signaux la contrôlant arrivent tous dans un intervalle de temps particulièrement réduit. Afin d'éliminer cette faiblesse résiduelle de la logique double rail, nous avons finalement proposé une amélioration simple mais efficace de la logique double rail. La logique résultante a été appelée STTL (Secured Triple Track Logic). La mise en oeuvre de cette logique a permis de montrer que la logique STTL permet d'obtenir des circuits dont les temps de calcul et la consommation sont indépendants des données.

Purpose – The purpose of this thesis was to follow up and further develop an existing product at Fagerhult AB. The product is a support rail for pendant luminaires. The support rail facilitates the positioning of the luminaire when mounted in the ceiling. The problem with today’s support rail is that it doesn’t meet the requirements set by Fagerhult AB according to aesthetics and flexibility. The request is instead a support rail that takes less space, more aesthetically appealing and more flexible. Methodology – The thesis has followed a product development process, from pilot study until prototype. First thing was a time planning to establish milestones to see when different parts of the project were supposed to be done. Then a pilot study was made in terms of market research and a competitor analysis to get a more complete picture of the today’s market and also what the market wanted. From the pilot study a complete requirement specification was made together with the customer. By the requirement specification a concept generation started in terms of brainstorming and morphologic matrix. The concepts were screened through elimination matrices and together with Fagerhult AB. The final concept was chosen from four more worked through concepts. Those concepts have all been made in a CAD-environment, Solid Edge, and physical prototypes have partially been made to be evaluated in different areas. The prototypes were evaluated in aesthetics, installation friendliness and manufacturing cost. The final concept was developed into a working prototype. Results – Already from the beginning the final result was divided into three different areas, T-clips, rail and sliding block. The final prototype consisted of a T-clips which was made in two pieces, spring steel and sheet metal. This was to offer an installation friendly support rail and also to make an opportunity to hide the T-clips which was previously exposed. The rail was designed with integrated covers on the ends and the opportunity to fit the sliding block inside, this was made to make the support rail more aesthetic appealing and to make sure that focus was not taken from the luminaire. The sliding block was then developed to fit inside the rail and suspension was offered for the wire loop. That way the wire loop, which is attached to the sliding block, could be hidden inside the rail. This resulted in an even more hidden supporting rail. To maintain the target value for the supporting rail the material was kept in standard and to some extent the construction had elements of already existing functions. Restrictions – Because of the lack of time the thesis only dealt with the product development process until prototype. The prototype was partially made by the writers themselves because Fagerhult AB:s prototype workshop had been busy. Neither FEM-calculations nor simulations was made to verify and optimize functions on the prototype, also this because of time constraints. / Syfte - Syftet med detta arbete var att vidareutveckla en befintlig produkt hos Fagerhult AB. Produkten är en bärskena för pendlade armaturer. Bärskenan underlättar positionering av armaturen väl monterad i undertaket som den är anpassad för. Problemet med dagens bärskena är att den inte uppfyller de krav som Fagerhult AB ställer gällande estetik och flexibilitet. En bärskena som tar mindre plats, mer estetisk tilltalande och mer flexibel efterfrågas.           Metodik - Utförandet av arbetet har följt en produktutvecklingsprocess, från förstudie till prototyp. Först gjordes en tidsplanering för att upprätta milstolpar när olika delar i projektet bör vara klara. Sedan gjordes en förstudie i form av marknadsundersökning och konkurrensanalys för att få en mer komplett bild av hur marknaden såg ut i dagsläget samt vad marknaden ville ha. Utifrån förstudien sammanställdes en definitiv kravspecifikation tillsammans med kund. Med kravspecifikationens grund påbörjades konceptgenereringen i form av brainstorming och morfologisk matris. Koncepten sållades sedan genom elimineringsmatriser och tillsammans med Fagerhult. Det slutgiltiga konceptet valdes utifrån fyra mer genomarbetade koncept. Dessa koncept är uppritade i en CAD-miljö, Solid Edge, och till viss del är fysiska prototyper framtagna för att utvärderas i olika områden. De utvärderades i estetik, installationsvänlighet och tillverkningskostnad. Det slutgiltiga konceptet utvecklades till en funktionsduglig prototyp. Resultat - Det slutgiltiga resultatet hade från början delats upp i tre olika delområden, T-clips, skena och glidblock. Den slutgiltiga prototypen bestod av ett T-clips som var tvådelat i fjäderstål och tunnplåt. Detta för att erbjuda en installationsvänlig bärskena samt möjligheten att dölja T-clipset som förr exponerats. Skenan utformades med integrerade täcklock på ändarna samt möjligheten att placera glidblocket inuti skenan, detta för att få en mer estetiskt tilltalande bärskena samt att fokus inte skulle tas från belysningsarmaturen. Glidblocket utvecklades för placering inuti skenan samt erbjöds upphängning av vajeröglan. På så sätt kunde vajeröglan, som fästs i glidblocket, döljas inuti skenan. Detta resulterade i att bärskenan doldes ytterligare. För att bärskenan skulle bibehålla målpriset behölls standardmaterial och till viss del hade konstruktionen inslag av redan befintliga funktioner. Begränsningar – På grund av tidsbristen behandlade arbetet endast produktutvecklingsprocessen fram till funktionsprototyp. En prototyp författarna själva till viss del fick ta fram därför att Fagerhult AB:s prototypverkstad varit belastad. Varken simuleringar eller FEM-beräkningar har utförts på prototypen för att verifiera funktionerna och optimera, även detta på grund av tidsbrist.

The diploma thesis analyzes the changes in transport policy during the time of Thatcher and Major conservative governments. It tries to answer why the traffic situation resulted in a permanent break with the concept raised in the 1940s by labour government. The changes are associated with principles of Thatcherism which also influenced the transport industry. The contribution of the work consists of creating a compact view of the privatization of bus and rail transport, including consideration and evaluation of options and results. Both the same and different elements of the privatization of two transport sectors are mentioned. Author uses information from contemporary sources obtained in the National Archives, London-Kew as well as modern literature and scientific studies.

The present master’s thesis deals with the appropriate measuring methods to determine the technical state of the machine tool for production of pressure tanks of Common Rail injection system. The main topic of this thesis is also a constructional adjustment of problem clamping components whose function affects the quality of the pressure tank.