Abstract
The Austrian rail network is very diverse: The lines in the alpine areas have very tight radii while the lines in the flat areas (east and north of Austria) are mainly straight high-speed lines. This leads to different levels of wheel and rail wear. Accordingly, the objective of this study was to experimentally model a laboratory-scale cyclic wheel-rail contact to investigate wear behavior and rolling contact fatigue at different radii (RCF).A novel test system was set up at AC2T research GmbH to reproduce unidirectional loading on a real track. Tribotests were performed with rail (grades R260, R350HT & R400HT) and wheel (grades ER7 & ER9) parts from the field. This newly designed principle is an effective method to characterize the wheel-rail contact. Wear characterization was done after defined testing cycles to detect (i) area loss and (ii) change in surface topography.
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