A numerical model of twin disc test arrangement for the evaluation of railway wheel wear prediction methods

Abstract

Twin disc tests are commonly used to study wear in railway materials. In this work the implementation of a numerical model of the twin disc arrangement is given, which reproduces the distribution of tangential forces over the contact patch between the two discs. Wear is subsequently calculated by relating the forces and creepage between the two discs using three different wear functions found in the literature. The resulting wear rates are compared with experimental data for discs made of common railway wheel and rail steels. This allows a comparison and assessment of the validity of the different wear algorithms considered.

Application of a Computational Tool to Study the Influence of Worn Wheels on Railway Vehicle Dynamics

“…It consists of using the commercial multibody software VAMPIRE [18], which is used to study the dynamics of the railway vehicles, integrated with a purpose-built wear computation module that is used to predict the wear of railway steel wheels [6,8,10,19].…”

“…The wear computational module is a purpose-built code [6,8,10,19]. That is used to manage the pre-and postprocessing dynamic analysis data in order to compute the wheel profiles wear for a given railway system.…”

“…The contact model processes the dynamic analysis results to obtain the wheel-rail contact parameters [20][21][22][23][24]. The wear function uses these contact parameters as input to compute the quantity of worn wheel material [5][6][7]19]. The wear distribution removes the quantity of worn material from the wheel profiles.…”

“…In general, these wear laws use the normal and tangential forces and the relative slip velocities (creepages), as input to compute the wear. In the literature [5][6][7]19,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] different methods for estimating wear of railway wheels can be found. These methods are based on real wear data acquired using different experimental techniques.…”

“…In this work, the wear function developed by the University of Sheffield [6,19] where T is the tangential contact force and  is the global creepage. This formulation is based on twin disk experimental data acquired from the contact between discs made of R8T wheel material and UIC60 900A rail material, which are the ones used to assemble the vehicles and tracks considered here.…”