Rail Wear Prediction for Different Wheel-Rail Profile Combinations based on VI-Rail simulations

Description

Since the beginning of railway transport, railway tracks have been accompanied by wear and until now asset owners and maintainers of the tracks are struggling to get rid of it. Although the latter is not possible, predicting the amount of wear leads to maintenance planning optimization and cost
reduction. The influence of the dynamic behavior of vehicles on the rail wear and the distribution of the contact patches for different combinations of wheel and rail profiles have been investigated by conducting vehicle-track simulations in VI-RAIL. Results from these simulations on the distribution of the size and location of the contact patches are used to predict the accumulated wear depth at critical points of the rail. This paper will discuss how the results from the VI-RAIL simulations are served as input for a simplified physics based wear model to calculate rail wear. Furthermore the results obtained with the simplified model are compared with the results obtained from the VI-RAIL simulations using the Wear Toolkit.

Period	10 May 2017 - 11 May 2017
Event title	International VI-Grade Users Conference 2017: Bridging the gap between testing and simulation
Event type	Conference
Location	Turin, Italy
Degree of Recognition	International