Wheel-rail contact modelling for locomotive traction control system studies

Recent locomotive traction studies have been extensively focused on the development of wheel-rail contact models for application inside multibody software products to compute results which can be further used in the prediction of track damage indexes. These models are quite sufficient, but they have a significant disadvantage of slow computational speed. In order to use the same locomotive models for traction studies, a new concept of the model was studied. The main difference from existing models is the developed normal task approach that provides a transition from non-Hertzian to Hertzian contact patches and this innovation was validated against the results obtained in a parallel computation test implemented inside of the wheel-rail coupling based on the Extended Contact library. The test was performed with a multibody locomotive model running on tangent track. The first implementation of the developed wheel rail-coupling has been tested in a parallel mode with the Extended Contact library on a full mechatronic model of a locomotive and the results compared against each other. Discussion on the further development is provided. © 2020 ASME