Examination of contact analysis between a wheel and the rail using discrete element method

Abstract

The wheel of the railway runs while coming into contact on a rail. Therefore, wear occurs in both. When these wears progress, the vibration is amplified. It leads to various problems such as a ride comfort and a noise. Many researchers examined the contact of a wheel and the rail so far. However, as for the shape of the abrasion to be formed on the surface of a wheel and the rail by progress of the abrasion, it is difficult to observe the abrasion situation to change each moment. It is necessary to investigate the process of shape change on wheel and rail in order to examine the influence of wear progress. In this study, we focused on a Discrete Element Method (DEM) that was effective for the dynamic behavior analysis of the granular material. The rail was expressed by replacing the irregularities of the rail surface to particles. A wheel ran on the particles replaced as a rail. Possibility of DEM was examined by comparing the calculated results with the experimental results of repetitive running. As a result, both showed that the acceleration level of the wheel increase and decrease repeatedly. In addition, it was found that the suggested analytical method of this study might be obtained the results similar to the tendency by the experiment.

Keywords

• discrete element method
• friction
• wear
• wheel/rail interaction
• rolling contact