from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Nowadays the technological progress of the railway transport is characterized by high demand for new material and technological solutions throughout the whole construction whilst taking into account the carrying and conducting traction equipment, which is traditionally manufactured from pure materials via continuous casting and die forging. The current renewal works of the railway trunks carried out all over Europe connected with simultaneous expansion generate large amounts of traction scrap in the form of worn-out carrying ropes and overhead contact lines. Therefore, research work was undertaken in order to develop new recycling technology of the aforementioned scrap into new traction equipment. The first works related to the development of this technology which assumes the use of minimum 80% of the traction scrap was directed into identifying the occurring impurities on the surface of the tested materials and their direct influence on the final properties of the product. Firstly, the analysis of the thickness of the impurities layer on the surface of carrying ropes and overhead contact lines and the chemical composition analysis with the use of the scanning electron microscope was conducted. The majority of the impurities were oxygen and silicon. In order to investigate the influence of these impurities on the new material obtained from the traction scrap the tested materials were melted and crystallized. A large number of impurities in the copper matrix were detected and they may have a direct impact on the production processes (die forging, supersaturation, artificial aging) of the new carrying and conducting traction equipment.
Keywords: Metallurgy, copper, metal scraps, traction scraps, recycling© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.