Rail transit vehicles are subject to frequent stops and starts near stations, the contact stress distribution between the wheel-rail interfaces become more complex during the process of acceleration and deceleration, which leads to unusual wheel-rail wear and debris behavior. An innovative wheel-rail rolling contact fatigue and wear test rig JD-DRCF/M is developed to carry out the cyclic acceleration and deceleration wear test for the wheel-rail rolling contact tribo-pairs and real-time monitoring of particle emission under frequent start-stop conditions, to understand the wear behavior and particle emission characteristics of the wheel-rail rolling contact interface near the station. The results showed that, the adhesion coefficient between wheel and rail is significantly affected by the acceleration αr. With the increase of the acceleration αr, the adhesion coefficient after the completion of the acceleration stage showed a trend of gradually decreased and then gradually rose. Moderate acceleration (e.g., αr= 800 r•min-2) reduces the adhesion between wheel and rail interface, and mitigates the wear loss of wheel and rail effectively. The emission of inhalable particles (e.g., 3.0 μm ≤ d ≤ 10.0 μm) is significantly increased under the start-stop condition (i.e., the condition of acceleration). In especial, this phenomenon was more serious under the low acceleration condition (e.g., αr= 400 r•min-2). © 2022 Journal of Mechanical Engineering.
