PREDICTION OF WHEEL PROFILE WEAR

Prediction techniques have existed for some years to calculate wheel-rail contact patch information and the response of a vehicle to any input from track roughness. More recently, experimental information has become available relating the wear rate of a wheel or rail surface to the energy dissipated within the contact zone. The prediction method described in this paper brings all this information together into a single programme in which each programme loop represents a single-journey calculation. From the time history of the response, the position of the contact on the wheel and the wheel-rail creep forces and creepages are correlated and summed to give a material loss distribution across the wheel profile and hence a small change in profile shape. The contact patch data are recomputed before each journey, which is then repeated as often as required to achieve a desired mileage.