Prediction of wheel/rail profile wear

The alteration in wheel and rail profiles due to wear involves considerable vehicle and track-maintenance costs, and influences the loading capacity of the rails, as well as the operation safety and riding comfort of the vehicles. In the past twenty years a vehicle dynamics, contact mechanics and tribology based research work has emerged which is also recently continuous in an international scale, and this research is more and more intensive. Parallel to the growing possibilities of computer based analyses, several algorithms and numerical procedures have been elaborated, as well as measurement based experiments have been carried out to establish the reliable prediction of wear-caused wheel and rail profile alterations and to maximise the mileage performance by selecting the optimum vehicle system parameters for running gears operating on a selected railway line or a whole network under specified - in general inherently stochastic - traffic conditions. This paper takes an attempt to introduce the extended sphere of problems of wheel and rail wear prediction, as well as the latest results reflecting the present state of the art.