The impact of wheel polygonisation to the railway corrugation

Abstract

The railway companies have been beset by rail corrugation for many years, especially those subway companies. Therefore, the formation mechanism of rail corrugation has been paid much attention in the last decades. It is believed that corrugation occurs when the vehicle runs over the track and excites its resonant vibration. Wheel polygonal wear (WPW), as a typical wheel tread defect, inevitably worsens the wheel-rail contact state and excites track vibration. However, little attention has been paid to the impact of the WPW to rail corrugation. In this paper, the impact of WPW to rail corrugation is considered. Firstly, the wheel-rail interaction with WPW is analysed, where the wheel-rail interactive force is treated as a moving harmonic load. Then, the impact of WPW to rail corrugation is investigated with the help of theoretical analysis and simulation experiments. The specific track with integrated ballast bed is considered as an example. The results show that the initial rail wear is largely due to WPW. And when the track resonance is excited by the moving harmonic excitation induced by WPW, the initial wear evolves into rail corrugation. In addition, WPW intensifies the development of existing corrugation and leads to some new corrugation.