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

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IDMEC—Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal

    João Pombo, Jorge Ambrósio & Manuel Pereira

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Sheffield, Mappin Street, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK

    Roger Lewis & Rob Dwyer-Joyce

  3. Running Dynamics—ALSTOM Ferroviaria S.p.A., Via O. Moreno 23, 12038, Savigliano (CN), Italy

    Caterina Ariaudo & Naim Kuka

Authors
  1. João Pombo
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  2. Jorge Ambrósio
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  3. Manuel Pereira
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  4. Roger Lewis
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  5. Rob Dwyer-Joyce
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  6. Caterina Ariaudo
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  7. Naim Kuka
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Correspondence to João Pombo.

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Pombo, J., Ambrósio, J., Pereira, M. et al. A study on wear evaluation of railway wheels based on multibody dynamics and wear computation. Multibody Syst Dyn 24, 347–366 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11044-010-9217-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11044-010-9217-8

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