Research and improvement of spring clip design of rail fastening system

Spring clip are widely used in modern rail fastening systems. Cyclically varying stress appear in the spring clip when the railway vehicle passes. This leads to fatigue cracks in the spring clip and their subsequent destruction. Thus, increasing the fatigue strength of spring clips is an urgent task in the development of railway transport. The paper considers a spring clip in the fastening of a rail with reinforced concrete sleepers (fastening ZhBR-65). The finite element modeling of the loading process of the ZhBR-65 spring clip has been carried out. The maximum stress intensity σi was 411 MPa. A new design of a spring clip has been developed, in which the arc sleeper sections (adjacent to the sleepers) are made with a barrel-shaped cross-section. The safety factor of the resulting structure is 1.22 times higher than that of the standard ZhBR-65 spring clip.