Wheel–rail impact loads and axle bending stress simulated for generic distributions and shapes of discrete wheel tread damage

Railway wheel tread damage and axle bending stress – Instrumented wheelset measurements and numerical simulations

“…At a vehicle speed of 130 km/h, this roughly corresponds to a sampling distance of 7 cm, which is significantly larger than the employed sampling distance. Further, using the same simulation model as the one of the present paper, it was shown in Ref [14]. that a wheelset bending mode occurring at frequency 206 Hz was dominating the dynamic axle bending stresses resulting from a wheel-rail impact due to a discrete wheel tread defect.…”

“…However, because of the contact filter effect, where the wheel trajectory is not influenced by small defects (independent of their depth) since the wheel and rail surfaces make contact around the defect, the influence of these defects on wheel-rail contact forces and axle stresses can be expected to be negligible. Indeed, the parameter study presented in Ref [14]. showed that the increase in dynamic axle stresses due to a discrete defect with length 20 mm is negligible.…”

“…A versatile and cost-efficient method to simulate the vertical dynamic interaction between a wheelset and railway track, accounting for generic distributions and shapes of wheel tread damage, has recently been presented in Ref [14]. The wheelset (comprising two wheels, axle and any attached equipment for braking and power transmission) and track with two discretely supported rails are described by three-dimensional finite element (FE) models.…”

“…The wheelset model with 106,600 degrees of freedom (dofs) is meshed using twenty-node quadratic brick elements referred to as C3D20 in Ref [19]. More information about the material properties and the meshing technique is given in Ref [14]. The 3D periodic FE model of a tangent ballasted track section has been established in Abaqus using Python scripts.…”

“…In parallel, by employing the procedure described in Ref [14], an in-house software for the simulation of vertical wheel-rail contact forces and dynamic axle stresses for prescribed combinations of wheel-rail surface damage and vehicle operating conditions has been applied. For traffic on tangent track, the simulations were performed using the measured wheel OOR combined with different levels of rail roughness as input to a model of the vehicle-track system.…”