Lightweight design and additive manufacturing of one-piece rotating arm axle box for high-speed locomotives

Abstract

Abstract Against the background of the continuous increase in the operating speed of the rolling stock, the working environment of the axlebox is becoming more and more severe. To meet the increasing operational demand, the strength and quality requirements of the axle box are also increased accordingly. To realize lightweight design to ensure structural strength, the traditional casting process has the problems of low densities of molded parts, long processing cycles, etc. In contrast, the laser selective melting technology can mold the workpiece with excellent mechanical properties and realize complex structures, effectively solving the above problems. In this paper, the one-piece rotary arm axle box is selected as the research object, its extraordinary load conditions are calculated, and the feasibility of the SLM axle box is verified by hydrostatic simulation. On this basis, the topology optimization design of the axle box is further optimized, and the optimized structural strength and vibration performance are verified by static and modal simulation. SLM technology is used to print components that are ten times smaller in size, and based on the compression experiments, it is verified that its strength meets the design requirements after printing, and the mass of the optimized components is reduced by about 15.4%.