Design for Pin Steel Bearings with Huge Horizontal Carrying Capability

The bearing in the roof of railway station is usually assumed three-dimensional fixed pin support. Good load-supporting, rotate and back-moving capacities are needed in the bearing design as well as durability. And the most prominent problem is how to bear so huge horizontal load in limited architecture space. Traditional spherical bearing couldn’t sustain huge horizontal loading because of excessive stress concentration induced by point-to-surface contact between upper and base plates. In this paper, a new economical steel hinged bearing form is developed to use surface contact to improve horizontal force carrying capacity. By FEM software ANSYS, nonlinear analyses are performed on bearing models to obtain necessary design results. Comparison between new and traditional bearings shows that new steel bearing is much more reasonable and economic.