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.
Index Terms—Multibody dynamics analysis, railway vehicle, rail wear, wheel-rail contact.
Biao Li, Fei Shen, and Lichun Bai are with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (e-mail: libiao@ntu.edu.sg).
Kevin Kho is with the SMRT Trains Pte Ltd, Singapore.
Zhou Kun is with the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (e-mail: kzhou@ntu.edu.sg).
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Cite: Biao Li, Fei Shen, Lichun Bai, Kevin Kho, and Kun Zhou, "Numerical Analysis of Rail Wear Behavior in Railway Systems," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 166-170, 2019.
