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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 98
PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RAILWAY TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE
Edited by: J. Pombo
Paper 100

Wear Modelling in Railway Vehicles: Development and Implementation of an Innovative Model for the Prediction of the Wheel Profile Evolution due to Wear

J. Auciello, M. Ignesti, L. Marini, E. Meli, A. Rindi and P. Toni

Department of Energy Engineering, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
J. Auciello, M. Ignesti, L. Marini, E. Meli, A. Rindi, P. Toni, "Wear Modelling in Railway Vehicles: Development and Implementation of an Innovative Model for the Prediction of the Wheel Profile Evolution due to Wear", in J. Pombo, (Editor), "Proceedings of the First International Conference on Railway Technology: Research, Development and Maintenance", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 100, 2012. doi:10.4203/ccp.98.100
Keywords: multibody modelling of railway vehicles, wheel-rail contact, wear models.

Summary
In railway applications, the wear estimation in the wheel-rail contact is an important field of study, mainly correlated to the planning of maintenance interventions, vehicle stability and the possibility to carry out specific strategies for the wheel profile optimization.

In this work authors present a model conceived for the evaluation of the wheel profile evolution due to wear, which is organized in two parts, mutually interactive: a vehicle model for the dynamic analysis and a model for the wear estimation. The first one is a 3D multibody model of a railway vehicle implemented in SIMPACK, a commercial software for the analysis of mechanical systems; the wheel-rail interaction, based on an innovative contact points research method developed by Authors in previous works, is implemented in a C/C++ user routine of SIMPACK. Normal and tangential forces in the contact patches are calculated according to Hertz and Kalker's global theory respectively.

The wear model, developed in MATLAB environment, is mainly based on experimental relationships found in literature between the removed material due to wear and the energy dissipated by friction at the contact. It starts from the outputs of the multibody simulations (position of contact points, contact forces and creepages) and estimates the contact pressures by means of a local contact model (FASTSIM algorithm); finally the removed material is calculated and the worn wheel profile is obtained.

This approach allows, evaluating both the quantity of removed material and its distribution along the wheel profile, to analyze the development of the wheel shape during its lifetime. In order to reproduce the wear progression, the overall mileage travelled by the vehicle is divided into discrete steps during which the wheel profile is constant; after the dynamic simulation of one step, the wheel profile is updated by means of the wear model. Therefore, the two models work alternately until completing the whole mileage. The choice of an appropriate length of the step is fundamental in terms of precision and computational time required.

The entire model has been validated in collaboration with Trenitalia S.P.A, which has provided the technical documentation and the experimental results relating to some tests performed with the vehicle DMU ALn 501 "Minuetto" on the Aosta-Pre Saint Didier line.

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