A Pin-On-Disk Study of Rail and Wheel in Dry and Mist Environments

Abstract

The railways operate in various varying environmental conditions. The working environments affects the tribology of the rail and wheel contact. Therefore, the tribological properties of rail and wheel contact become important to study in these conditions. Commonly, rail and wheel contact functions under mist and wet conditions. The present study is conducted to analyse the behaviour of friction force and wear under dry, water with MQL and wet condition. The MQL is used to generate the mist condition. The study is performed on pin-on-disk tribometer in which pin is made of rail track material and disk is made of wheel material. From the experiments it was found that the friction force and wear both decreases significantly for mist condition as compared to dry condition and is least for wet condition. It was also noted that if load is increased the friction force and wear depth are also increases under all three conditions.