In the field of simulation of railroad vehicles, there are many numerical models to estimate the interaction forces between the wheel and rail. The main advantage of these models is that they can be used together with multi-body dynamics software to calculate the motion of a vehicle in real time. However, the result of these contact models is usually post-processed to estimate wear on the profiles and some hypotheses assumed by the contact models may be inadequate for wear analysis. This is the case when considering surface roughness, which is not introduced in the numerical models and makes wear prediction imprecise. In this work an experimental method based on the measurement of ultrasonic reflection is used to solve the contact problem, together with a FASTSIM (simplified theory of rolling contact) algorithm. This technique is suitable to deal with rough surfaces and gives a better approximation of the material behaviour. Wear is estimated by means of the energy dissipation approach (T•gamma). Two different contacts are investigated, using wheel and rail profiles coming from unused and worn specimens. In order to obtain realistic results, special care is taken when locating the specimens to reproduce the same contact that appears between the wheel and the rail in the track.

ElsevierRovira Cardete, A.; Roda Buch, A.; Marshall, M. (2012). Application of Fastsim with variable coefficient of friction using twin disc experimental measurements. Wear. 274-275:109-126. doi:10.1016/j.wear.2011.08 AbstractIn the field of railway simulation, it is a general assumption to consider the coefficient of friction as a known and constant value. This hypothesis is clearly not correct as friction is a consequence of the operating conditions (an output, not an input) and many factors can cause friction coefficient to change. In this paper, numerical algorithms based on the simplified theory of Kalker (Fastsim) and capable of modelling variable friction are studied and improved to match experimental measurements. Experimental creep curves from twin disc measurements are used to extract the friction parameters required by the numerical algorithms. Different friction functions are tested to correlate the effect of the contaminants and the pressure on the coefficient of friction. Finally, two examples are shown to highlight the differences between modelling the wheel-rail contact with variable or constant coefficient of friction and their implications in the estimation of the interaction forces and wear.

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The tribo-electrochemical behavior of AISI 316L has been investigated under tribocorrosion conditions in a 3% NaCl solution and the material damage evolution with time has been analyzed. A numerical contact model based on a Boundary Element Method (BEM) has been developed in order to determine the contact pressure distribution and to quantify the worn material as a function of time. The time dependence of the tribological behavior of the material has been described. At the initial state, the high contact pressures generate a material flow causing an increase in the worn area. After around 300 cycles, the Archard wear model linearly describes the wear evolution with time. The proposed model describes the evolution with time of the wear profiles of the tested material and takes into account the plastic behavior of the material during the first cycles.

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