Consideration of roughness and elastic-plastic behavior in a wheel-rail contact modeling for locomotive traction studies

An algorithm for the detection of the real contact stresses with different surface roughness parameters considering elastic and plastic deformations and tribological behavior at the wheel-rail interface was further developed and implemented in the wheel-rail coupling in the Gensys railway vehicle multibody software. Locomotive multibody model simulations using the developed wheel-rail coupling were performed under traction conditions that confirm a workability of the proposed algorithm by means of a comparison with results obtained with the original Extended CONTACT wheel-rail couplings under the same operational and simulation conditions. The results obtained allow an understanding of the difference in contact stress results between rough (Wheel Ra=0.7m, Rail Ra=0.4m) and ‘ideal’ (i.e. perfectly Smooth) contacts, and limitations are stated in this paper.