3-D Rail-Wheel contact analysis using FEA

Mechanics of the Rail-Wheel contact is one of the fundamental areas of the study in Railway Engineering, requiring both vast application expertise and dependable analysis approaches. Analytical formulations describing the physics of this phenomenon are only defined for certain type of simple contact geometries, therefore for more complicated geometries the analytical models utilizing closed formulations remain elusive. Remaining option is to utilize numerical computation methods. Railway engineers are, to the certain extent, successfully applied one of the numerical computation techniques known as Finite Element Analysis (FEA) into Rail-Wheel contact problems to validate their results by comparing them to their real life data obtained over the years. In the literature, most of the work on the Rail-Wheel contact FEA is either 2-dimensional axi-symmetric or simple 3D Rail-Wheel models with poor mesh count/quality or undesired Tet-mesh, latter known to exhibit stiff deformation characteristics during the deformation. Also, in majority of the FEA studies, boundary conditions and/or total load are applied with some approximations. This study focuses more on the fundamental way of handling Rail-Wheel contact problems from the FEA standpoint, and highlights required steps for more realistic 3D solutions to these types of problems. 3D FE analysis results obtained show good agreement with real life problems experienced at both railway Wheel and Rail. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.