Effects of wheel-rail contact modelling on wheel wear simulation

Three non-elliptic contact models, namely Kik-Piotrowski method, STRIPES and ANALYN, are first compared to the Hertz theory and the CONTACT code in terms of the normal contact solution. Further, for the contact models except for CONTACT, the tangential contact solutions are calculated by a modified simplified theory of Kalker (FASTSIM) based on the normal ones to compare with that of CONTACT. Afterwards, a wheel wear prediction model, consisting of a multi-body dynamic model of the railway vehicle, a wheel-rail contact model and a wear function developed by the University of Sheffield, is developed. The influences of the five contact models mentioned above on the wheel wear prediction are investigated from viewpoints of calculation efficiency and accuracy. The results indicate that using Hertz theory and FASTSIM to solve the normal and tangential contact problem, respectively, in the wheel wear simulation is a good choice in order to consider a compromise between the calculation efficiency and accuracy.