Welded joint fatigue reliability analysis on bogie frame of high-speed electric multiple unit

A new method for welded joint fatigue reliability analysis on bogie frame of high-speed electric multiple unit (EMU) is proposed according to the International Union of Railways (UIC) standard, the Britain Standard Institute (BSI) standard and the Miner rule. Firstly, the fatigue calculation condition is loaded according to the UIC standard. The welded joint damage ratio is calculated by the BSI standard. Fatigue reliability analysis is conducted for a typical welded joint based on probabilistic design system (PDS) module in software ANSYS 14.0. In the system, the automatic program is prepared by ANSYS parametric design language (APDL) to calculate the welded joint fatigue damage ratio. Meantime, the relationship between the input variables and the output response is fitted by the response surface (RS) method. Then, the RS method is improved by the orthogonal design. Specifically, the selecting process optimization for the RS method based on the orthogonal design is conducted to improve the fitting efficiency of the RS method. Finally, a program of the automatic analysis documents is generated by Microsoft foundation class (MFC) technique. Through the self-defined interface, the researchers can easily import the automatic generation of the orthogonal table into the PDS module and analyze the fatigue reliability. Results show that the improved RS method can better fit the RS which covers the sample area, and the distribution law agrees well with the actual situation. At the same time, the improved RS method reduces the calculation time.