A Recursive Wheel Wear and Vehicle Dynamic Performance Evolution Computational Model for Rail Vehicles with Tread Brakes

Abstract

The increased temperature of the rail wheels due to tread braking causes changes in the wheel material properties. This article considers the dynamic wheel material properties in a wheel wear evolution model by synergistically combining a multi-body dynamics vehicle model with a finite element heat transfer model. The brake power is estimated from the rail-wheel contact parameters obtained from vehicle model and used in a finite element model to estimate the average wheel temperature. The wheel temperature is then used for wheel wear computation and the worn wheel profile is fed to the vehicle model, thereby forming a recursive simulation chain. It is found that at a higher temperature, the softening of the rail-wheel material increases the rate of wheel wear. The most affected dynamic performance parameter of the vehicle is found to be the critical speed, which reduces sharply as the wheel wear exceeds a critical limit.

Simulation of wheel and rail profile wear: a review of numerical models

“…Although great attention must be paid to the computational efficiency of the simulation, a direct quantitative comparison of the numerical models described in the previous section cannot be provided. In fact, the numerical tools shown above were Budapest University [65], KTH [38,66,67,[69][70][71][72][73], PoliMi [75], USFD [78], PoliMi + USFD [34,77,79], SWJTU [83], UNiFI + SWJTU [86], Others [88][89][90][91][92] Rail wear models: KTH [74], SWJTU [84] Wheel and rail wear models: Budapest University [36,64] Wheel wear models: AWARE [43,44,[94][95][96], UniFi [98][99][100][101][102]107], SWJTU [109,112], IIT [113][114][115]125], Others [93,97,111,116] Wheel and rail wear models: Un...…”

“…The task is clearly not easy as such numerical tool should be provided with a thermal module, because during tread braking the wheel surface heats up to high temperatures which drastically change the material properties. Research in this field is on-going [124,125], but still a complete model is not witnessed in the literature.…”

Estimating influence of rail profile shape on lateral wear of rail and wheel after grinding of 60E1 and R65 rails

“…8. There are also known methods [1][2][3] of dynamic simulation of rolling stock with the analysis of wheel/rail stresses. The above-mentioned methods and approaches for rail head profile restoration by grinding are based on the repetition of an initial rail profile.…”

“…To reduce this wear, various studies are known in the following areas: optimization of suspension stiffness parameters [1], dynamic analysis of wheel/rail [1; 3], thermal model taking into account the change of material properties from the temperature at braking [2], rail profile measurement by introducing additional measuring sensors 0º and 45º [4], lubrication of rails in curves [5; 18], modeling of FEM on curves of small radius in non-elastic and elastic setting of the problem [6; 7], optimization of wheel hardness [8], optimization of methods of creation of meshes of finite element contact models [9]. The advantage of these studies is a detailed description of the influence of one or more factors on wear.…”

Development of a numerical tool for the computation of rail wheel-brake shoe thermo-mechanical interaction based on a 2D plane finite element model

“…These models can be either 2D axisymmetric or 3D. However, 2D axisymmetric models [5][6][7][8][9][10] are not suitable for the prediction of hot spots, as they assume constant heat fluxes in circumferential direction, while 3D models [11][12][13][14] require huge computational efforts, especially when they are also demanded to solve the contact problem. At the same time, 2D plane models in the radial-circumferential plane were developed too, however they either perform an a priori assumption of the contact pressure [15,16] or they neglect some important phenomena [17], e.g., the dependency of the convection coefficient on wheel speed and the rail chill effect.…”