Abstract
The rail transit system is widely used for freight and passenger transportation. Due to the fact that its economic worthiness and high safety mode. Maintenance and damage prevention of wheel and rail are important factors affecting the safety of the system. The previous studies show that the most damage of wheel and rail is fatigue cracking, which is caused by the contact stress resulting from wheel and rail interaction. This article presents the study of the fatigue crack initiation location of wheel and rail under rolling contact at the wheel speed of 80 km/h using Finite Element Method (FEM). The three dimensional finite element models were created using the UIC60E1 wheel profile and BS100 rail profile. The Dang Van criteria was applied to analyse the fatigue crack initiation location in case of the wheel's position was changed along the rail lateral direction while the rail inclination angle was also varied at 0, 1/40, 1/30 and 1/20, respectively. The analysing results show that the fatigue crack initiation, determined by the Dang Van stress ratio, tends to increase when the wheel is moved from gauge side to field side. Additionally, the fatigue crack damage is likely to decrease when the rail inclination increases up to the inclination of 1/30 and the fatigue crack initiation locations were found underneath the wheel and rail surfaces. The obtained result can be a primary guideline for maintenance planning.
Highlights
Rolling contact fatigue is a damage generally appearing on contact surfaces between wheel and rail
This paper reported that the creep force characteristic from Finite Element Method (FEM) solution is slightly lower than the result obtained by the CONTACT software
The major findings can be summarized as follows: (1) The peak contact pressure is potential to increase as the rail inclination increases up to 1/30 and the peak contact pressure gradually increases if the wheel lateral position is moved from gauge side to field side
Summary
Rolling contact fatigue is a damage generally appearing on contact surfaces between wheel and rail. The previous studies[1] reported that the several accidents of train derailment resulted from damages of wheel/rail, such as, spalling, fatigue crack, shelling, rolling fatigue and thermal crack [2]. Martin Pletz et al [5] purposed a full scale test rig of rolling contact fatigue and performed the simulation of wheel and rail loading of test-rig by using FEM combined with CONTACT software. The contact area on the top of the rail is bigger than the other at the gauge corner. This might be due to the lower lateral load
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