Analysis of the features of wheel out-of-roundness and construction of the wheel roughness spectrum of high-speed trains

Wheel out-of-roundness (OOR), especially wheel polygonal wear, occurs frequently in high-speed wheels in China and has a significant influence on vehicle operation and wheel maintenance. The authors' team has measured wheel OOR for more than 30,000 wheels with high-precision measuring instruments on nine types of high-speed EMUs over the past decade. In this study, the features of the wheel OOR are analyzed in detail and the wheel roughness spectrum is determined in both the narrow band and the 1/3 octave band. A method for inverting the wheel polygonal with the sine and catenary type is proposed. The analysis of the wheel OOR features, the establishment of the wheel roughness spectrum, and the resampling of wheel out-of-roundness profile from a roughness spectrum are of great importance for the simulation analysis of the dynamic wheel – rail interaction and rolling noise, as well as for the design of vehicle and track components.