A study on wear evaluation of railway wheels based on multibody dynamics and wear computation

The wear evolution of railway wheels is a very important issue in railway engineering. In the past, the reprofiling intervals of railway vehicle steel wheels have been scheduled according to designers' experience. Today, more reliable and accurate tools in predicting wheel wear evolution and wheelset lifetime can be used in order to achieve economical and safety benefits. In this work, a computational tool that is able to predict the evolution of the wheel profiles for a given railway system, as a function of the distance run, is presented. The strategy adopted consists of using a commercial multibody software to study the railway dynamic problem and a purpose-built code for managing its pre- and post-processing data in order to compute the wear. The tool is applied here to realistic operation scenarios in order to assess the effect of some service conditions on the wheel wear progression.