A study of wheel wear on a high-speed railway motor car

Abstract

Wheel/rail wear is one of the key issues in the safe operation of a high-speed railway motor car. This paper analyzes and predicts the wheel wear evolution of motor car during the long-term operation process. Firstly, the detailed motor car with gear transmission systems and trailer car of the high-speed train, which take into account various non-linear factors such as dampers, bump stops, wheel/rail contact relation, etc., are developed to obtain interaction force between wheel and rail. Secondly, according to the tread update strategy based on fixed travel distance, a novel wheel wear prediction model integrating the Archard wear model and previous dynamics system is established. In order to more accurately obtain the dynamic responses of the motor car, the comprehensive gear transmission system coupling with motor bogie is also built, which considers the time-varying mesh stiffness and gear shift coefficient. And the corresponding traction characteristic curve is also applied to the gear transmission system. Finally, the wheel wear evolution in one re-profiling cycle is simulated to verify the developed model, and the wheel wear mechanism is investigated in detail. Furthermore, the influence of traction velocity on wheel wear is also investigated. The simulation shows that the cumulative wear amount of both two cars increases gradually and the wear rate decreases gradually with traveling mileage, but the wear rate of the trailer car decreases faster than that of the motor car due to larger longitudinal creepage and longitudinal creep force induced by traction torque. Moreover, the max wheel wear depth and wear bandwidth for motor car gradually increase with traction velocity. While the discrepancies of the max wheel wear depth and wear bandwidth for trailer car are small under different speeds.