Analysis of the service life of railway hydraulic dampers considering temperature and loading

Hydraulic dampers are mainly used to maintain high-speed trains in a stable state when running at high speed. In this paper, an equivalent method for the lifetime of dampers is proposed to establish the relationship between the long-term loading test and the mileage in service condition. The performance degradation of the damper at different temperatures is calculated using the long-term loading test carried out under the corresponding temperature conditions. Arrhenius model is applied to convert the degradation under different temperatures, and the sensitive parameter is selected for the conversion of the damper’s performance degradation under different temperatures. An energy method is proposed to solve the problem of the damper lifetime under different loads, so as to achieve the equivalent of the damper between the long-term load test and the mileage in service condition. Finally, taking the anti-yaw damper of a certain type of high-speed train in China as the research object, the lifetime equivalent method proposed in this paper is applied and the result showed that the anti-yaw damper had remaining service life after 2.4 million kilometers of service.