Development of a model for the simultaneous analysis of wheel and rail wear in railway systems

Abstract

The prediction of wheel and rail wear is a fundamental issue in the railway field, both in terms of vehicle stability and in terms of economic costs (planning of maintenance interventions). In particular the need of an accurate wear model arises from the interest of Trenitalia S.p.A. and Rete Ferroviara Italiana in designing new wheel and rail profiles and new bogie architectures optimized from the wear viewpoint with the aim of improving the wear and stability behavior of the standard ORE S1002 wheel profile matched with the UIC60 rail profile canted at 1/20 rad (which represents the wheel–rail combination adopted by the Italian railway line). In this work the authors present a wear model specifically developed for the evaluation of the wheel and rail profile evolution, the layout of which is made up of two mutually interactive but separate units: a vehicle model for the dynamical analysis and a model for the wear evaluation. Subsequently the new model has been compared with the wear evaluation procedure implemented in Simpack, a widely tested and validated multibody software for the analysis of the railway vehicle dynamics; the comparison aims both to evaluate the model performance (in terms of accuracy and efficiency) and to further validate the wear model (just tested, as regards the wheel wear prediction, in previous works related to the critical Aosta–Pre Saint Didier line). The comparison has been carried out considering a benchmark train composed by a locomotive (E.464) and a passenger vehicle (Vivalto) provided by Trenitalia while the simulations have been performed on a mean Italian railway line (obtained by means of a statistical analysis of the data relative to the whole Italian railway network provided by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI)).