A combined simulation procedure for wear assessment of the HXN5 locomotive

Wear phenomena like flange wear and hollow-worn tread of HXN5 locomotive wheels are studied by a nonlinear iterative procedure. For better understanding of these specific wheel wear mechanism, a numerical solution is developed by a combination of a SIMPACK multibody model and Archard's wear theory. The wheel wears can be predicted by the nonlinear wear formulation, in which real time parameters of state conditions and contact forces are updated by the multibody simulation in a parallel manner. Five numerical examples of the locomotive simulation are presented and numerical results are in good agreements with the real observations. The present simulation procedure is validated to be effective in dynamic steady wheel wear and may be used to assess the optimization of locomotive bogie systems.