Numerical Analysis of Rail Wear Behavior in Railway Systems

Abstract

Wear of rails is one of the most crucial problems in railway systems. Understanding rail wear behavior is essential in determining the optimal maintenance schedules. This work numerically studied the rail wear behavior for curved tracks. A railway vehicle/track multibody dynamics model is established based on the commercial software Universal Mechanism, in which car body, wheelset and suspension subsystem of the train are included in the model. Archard's wear model is used to describe the wear evolution at the contact patch. The effects of train velocity, track radius and track super-elevation on the rail wear behaviors are studied. It was found that fast wear of the outer rail occurs at high train velocity, whereas the inner rail wear rate is increased when the train velocity decreases. The rail wear is sensitive to the track curvature. Larger track curvature leads to faster wear of the outer rail, and thus shorter grinding intervals are required. Moreover, for the outer rail, slower wear of outer rail is achieved when the super-elevation equilibrium velocity approximates the train velocity. Careful selection of super-elevation is important in reducing rail wear.

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

“…This approach is thus mainly introduced when short simulations are performed to assess the influence of specific properties on the computed wear. Biao Li et al [52], from Singapore, studied the influence of vehicle speed, curve radius and superelevation on the rail wear. The proposed model was built using the commercial software UM, introducing a MB model of a passenger metro vehicle running on a 600 m-long track and computing the rail wear by means of the UM wear module using the modified expression of the Archard law, see Eq.…”