| Abstract | In 2022, over 110 International Collaborative Research Initiative (ICRI) members gathered in-person during three organized conferences/workshops; the firsts to be held since the pandemic:
1. ICRI 2-day workshop in Ottawa, April 2022;
2. ICRI half-day workshop in Vancouver, June 2022, during the WRI Principles Course at the 27th annual Wheel Rail Interaction Conference (WRI 2022);
3. ICRI one day workshop in Melbourne, Australia, September 4, 2022, during the 12th International Conference on Contact Mechanics and Wear of Rail/Wheel Systems (CM 2022).
The ICRI also continued to host webinars, attracting over 350 viewers over 4 separate web-sessions. A total of 11 presentations were given during 2 web-based workshops and separate web-based presentations.
Planning is also underway for three more in-person conferences/workshops for 2023 in the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, and Brazil, and several web-based workshops.
In 2020 the ICRI initiated its most ambitious project ever - to develop a comprehensive model of brokenrail and broken rail derailments. A framework was developed that breaks the problem into seven distinct modules; each of these was then tackled by volunteer teams. The teams were asked to identify the module inputs, algorithms and outputs, the current methods/understanding, and research gaps or new technology needs. Five of the seven modules were analyzed in this way and numerous research questions and needs were uncovered. While there is more work that can be done within the ICRI, some of the questions will require dedicated resources that are outside the capabilities of a volunteer organization. It is hoped that universities and research organizations will take on these challenges and develop their own research efforts to progressively fill in the gaps.
The Quantify Surface Damage team continues to populate a matrix relating visible surface damage to subsurface depth with rail samples sent by the community and have finally accumulated enough samples to allow a direct comparison and draw conclusions about crack angles vs. location across the rail head, and depth of rolling contact fatigue (RCF) cracks based on the curvature and accumulated million gross tons of rail traffic passing over a track in a year (MGT). A good correlation can be seen between(destructively) measured crack depth and transverse EC scans; however, the same cannot be said for the longitudinal EC scans.
An earlier ICRI field studies effort was renewed in October of 2022, when a different Class 1 railroad, BNSF, agreed to host ICRI field studies related to friction, wear, RCF and (internal) defects, which will include the onsite collection of post-grind and then pre-grind measurements, over roughly a 50 mgt cycle, of eddy current measurements, friction measurements, rail profiles, machine vision images and photographs. Six organizations will participate in the field work and the resulting data is expected to form the basis for several other ICRI project initiatives.
Membership in the ICRI continues to rise, and now numbers over 400 individuals from 186 organizations in 35 countries, a gain of 70 persons, 26 organizations and 6 countries in the last year. |
|---|
