Wheel wear predictions and analyses of high-speed trains

Wear of wheel profiles is one of the most critical issues affecting cost and performance of railway transportation systems. By altering the profile from the shape originally chosen by the designer, wear has a very large effect on vehicle dynamics, so that excessive modifications of the original have to be recovered by griding and re-profiling the wheel to its original profile. Clearly, with high-speed train development, wheel profile design has been driven by keeping high level of passenger comfort and running safety and low track aggressiveness performances. A reliable wheel profile wear prediction model is developed and applied to a vehicle operating high-speed rail lines in China. The methodology is based on wheel wear simulations which are performed based on actual track data, and pertinent operating conditions. The vehicle model is built in the Simpack MBS software utilising validated suspension models. The contact between wheel and rail is modelled with an equivalent ellipse method and Kalker’s simplified theory (FASTSIM). The wear modelling is based on Archard’s wear model. Finally, validation against wheel profile measurements is performed by simulating approximately 240,000 km of running. Comparisons between simulated and measured wheel profiles, including four wheel wear indexes are presented. The agreement is generally very good. Copyright © 2012 De Gruyter.