Effects of profile wear on wheel–rail contact conditions and dynamic interaction of vehicle and turnout

Abstract

Severe wear is a common damage mechanism in railway turnouts, which strongly affects the dynamic performance of railway vehicles and maintenance costs of tracks. This article explores the effects of profile wear on contact behaviors in the wheel-rail/switch contact and dynamic interaction, and nominal and measured worn turnout rail profiles are used as boundary conditions of wheel-rail contact. The calculation of the dynamic loads and the resultant contact stresses and internal stresses makes it possible to rationally design railway turnouts and correctly select the material to be applied for their components. For these reasons, the multi-body system SIMPACK and finite element software ANSYS are used to calculate the features of load and subsequently distributions of contact stresses and internal stresses in the regions of wheel-turnout components. The results show that profile wear disturbs the distribution of wheel-rail contact point pairs, changes the positions of wheel-rail contact points along the longitudinal direction, and affects the dynamic interaction of vehicle and turnout. For the measured profile in this article, profile wear aggravates vertical dynamic responses significantly but improves lateral dynamic responses. Profile wear disturbs the normal contact situations between the wheel and switch rail and worsens the stress state of the switch rail.

Parameters Studies on Surface Initiated Rolling Contact Fatigue of Turnout Rails by Three-Level Unreplicated Saturated Factorial Design

“…The turnout model is an elastic track model (Figure 9) established according to a Chinese CN60-1100-1:18 high-speed railway turnout. For the detailed establishment of the models, see references [8,30]. …”

An Innovative and Efficient Method for Reverse Design of Wheel-Rail Profiles

“…As shown in Reference [23], according to their structural characteristics, high-speed bogies without considering side bearing, swing bolsters and swing platforms are used in order to establish a four-axle locomotive dynamic model. During the establishment of the model, the main structural components of the vehicle are simplified as rigid bodies, including the wheelset, bogie and vehicle body etc.…”

Stochastic fatigue damage assessment of metro switch blade

“…Typically, dynamic contact force is adopted to evaluate the damage on these defect-like components. [9][10][11][12][13][14] However, according to the previous study, 5 it is found that fatigue initiation spot is the birthplace of these bites. This detection suggests that multiaxial fatigue criterion could be more appropriate for damage evaluation on switch blade, instead of using dynamic contact force.…”