Prediction of wheel and rail profile wear on complex railway networks

The modelling and the reduction of wear due to wheel-rail contact represents a crucial issue in railway applications, mainly correlated to safety, maintenance interventions and definition of strategies aimed at wheel profile optimization. A model for evaluating wheel and rail profile evolution due to wear developed for complex railway networks is presented in this paper. The model layout is composed of two mutually interacting but separate parts: a vehicle model (composed of multibody model and global contact model) for the dynamical simulations and a unit for wear computation (composed of the local contact model, the wear evaluation procedure and the profile update strategy). In order to achieve general significant accuracy results in reasonable computational effort, a suitable statistical approach for the railway track description is used, aimed at studying complex railway lines: in fact, the exhaustive analysis of vehicle dynamics and wear evolution on all the railway network is too expensive in terms of computational time for each practical purpose. The wear model has been validated in collaboration with Trenitalia S.P.A and Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI), which have provided technical documentation and experimental data relative to some tests performed on a environment exhibiting serious problems in terms of wear: the vehicle ALn 501 Minuetto operated on the Aosta-Pre Saint Didier Italian line.