Justificación

The wheel polygonalization, known as the circumferential irregularities of the wheel, has been related to wear accumulation caused by the wheel/rail interactions over a relatively long service period [1]. A long-term wear prediction model is thus needed to investigate the growth in wheel polygonalization. Such a long-term prediction model has been used to investigate lower order wheel polygonalization [25,26,27] as well as the evolution of rail corrugation [152,166]. The long- term wear prediction model is formulated by integrating a wear model such as Archard sliding wear model to the coupled vehicle/track dynamic model, as shown in Fig.5.1. An iterative scheme is used to extend the wear prediction to relative long service periods, where each iteration describes the wear accumulation with an incremental operating distance of the wheel.

Initial OOR Vehicle-track model

Archard wear model Updated

OOR

Responses Track irrgularities

Scale factor

Figure 5.1: Long-term wear iteration scheme [27].

In the iterative scheme designed for predicting wheel wear, the initial OOR wheel irregularity measured after the re-profiling process together with the track irregularities are taken as inputs to the vehicle/track simulation model to determine resulting dynamic responses at the wheel-rail interface such as wheel/rail contact forces, creepage and slip region of the contact patch. The wear at each discrete point on the wheel circumference is subsequently predicted from the Archard wear model, which is taken as the short-term wear. The resulting short-term wear is manipulated via a scale factor to predict wear accumulation over a relatively longer operating distance in a

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computationally efficient manner [27]. The wheel profile is updated using the predicted wear response, which serves as the input to the vehicle/track model in the subsequent iteration, as seen in Fig.5.1. The iterative scheme thus permits prediction of evolution of wheel OOR over a relatively long period.

5.2.1 Coupled vehicle-track dynamic model

The vehicle/track system model is formulated for a typical high-speed railway car with flexible wheelsets coupled to the flexible slab track model through the wheel/rail contact model. The coupled model has been described in details in [29]. Briefly, the model comprises a car body supported on two bogies through the secondary suspensions. Each bogie frame is coupled with two wheelsets through the primary suspension and the axle box oriented along the longitudinal direction. Each wheelset is modelled as a flexible body. Modal approach is used to integrate both the flexible slab track and wheelset models to the car body and bogie, which are modeled as rigid bodies with 6 DOFs (degrees-of-freedom). The axle box, however, is only permitted to pitch about the axis of the wheelset axle shaft. The primary and secondary suspensions are modelled as parallel linear springs and viscous dampers along the three translational directions.

The track system is modelled as a flexible slab track, while the rail is described by the Timoshenko beam discretely supported on a slab segment via rail pads. Each slab segment, continuously supported on the cement asphalt mortar (CAM) layer, is modelled using finite element method. Each rail pad is modelled as a parallel combination of a linear spring and a viscous damper. The elasticity of the CAM layer is represented through discretely distributed spring-damper elements. The vehicle and track models are coupled through the wheel/rail contact model considering the S1002CN wheel and Rail 60 profiles [167]. The normal force distributed over the wheel-rail contact patch is determined through the Hertzian contact theory as a function of the penetration between the wheel and the rail. The tangential force developed in the contact patch is also calculated using the FASTSIM algorithm [124]. The model is limited to constant forward speed neglecting the contributions due to variations in longitudinal (braking/acceleration) forces. The wheel-rail contact force in the normal direction alone arising from excitations from a wheel with OOR defect is thus considered for wear prediction.

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The effect of dynamic wheel-rail contact force on the wheel wear is evaluated considering the slip region of the contact patch, which is determined from the FASTSIM algorithm [124]. For this purpose, the wheel is discretized into a total of 3600 points over its circumference with a resolution of 0.1° or 0.8 mm. The wear of each circumferential point within the slip region due to distributed contact force response is obtained using the Archard wear model. The model predicts the wear volume 𝑉_{𝑤𝑒𝑎𝑟} at each contact point within the slip region as a function of the material hardness H, a wear coefficient kw, normal force N and the sliding distance d [138], such that:

𝑉𝑤𝑒𝑎𝑟 = 𝑘𝑤𝑁𝑑_𝐻 (1)

The normal force developed at a point within the contact patch can be determined from the wheel/rail contact pressure distribution, given by [168,169]:

𝑝𝑧(𝑥, 𝑦) = _{2𝜋𝑎𝑏}3𝑁 √1 − (𝑥_𝑎) 2

− (𝑦_𝑏)2 (2) where 𝑝𝑧(𝑥, 𝑦) is the contact pressure at a point within the contact patch with coordinates (x,y),

and a and b are semi-axes of the elliptical contact patch, determined from the FASTSIM algorithm, as shown in Fig.5.2. The contact patch is further discretized into m×n elements with m strips along the y axes, each containing n elements. The number of elements is selected so as to obtain accurate prediction of the localized contact force. Polach [170] suggested that consideration of a 10×10 elements grid in the contact patch in the FASTSIM algorithm can yield reasonably accurate predictions of the contact force distribution. Johansson [141] showed that the accuracy of prediction increases with greater grid size, and a dense discretization can provide a continuous wear distribution. In this study, a grid of 30×30 elements is considered, which can yield an accuracy of about 95% in the estimation of creep forces according to the relationship between the number of elements and the estimation accuracy reported in [141].

Upon substituting Eq. (2) into Eq. (1), the wear depth 𝛥𝑧(𝑥_𝑖𝑗, 𝑦_𝑖𝑗) for each element can be obtained as:

Δ𝑧(𝑥𝑖𝑗, 𝑦𝑖𝑗) = 𝑘𝑤𝑝𝑧(𝑥𝑖𝑗,𝑦𝑖𝑗)Δ𝑑(𝑥_𝐻 𝑖𝑗,𝑦𝑖𝑗), 𝑖 = 1 ⋯ 𝑛, 𝑗 = 1 ⋯ 𝑚 (3)

where (𝑥𝑖𝑗, 𝑦𝑖𝑗) is coordinate of center of the ith element within the jth strip and Δ𝑑(𝑥𝑖𝑗, 𝑦𝑖𝑗) =

|𝑠(𝑥_𝑖𝑗, 𝑦_𝑖𝑗)|𝛥𝑡 represents the sliding distance of the same element. The time increment 𝛥𝑡 is the time duration that a material point on the wheel remains within one element of the contact

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patch, 𝛥𝑡 = 𝛥𝑥_𝑗/𝑣₀, where 𝑣₀ is the vehicle speed and 𝛥𝑥_𝑗 is the element length. The resultant slip velocity S(𝑥𝑖𝑗, 𝑦𝑖𝑗) for each element is determined in the slip region of the contact patch via the

FASTSIM algorithm. The wear depth 𝛥𝑧(𝑥_𝑖𝑗, 𝑦_𝑖𝑗) for each element can thus be expressed as a function of the slip velocities in x- and y-directions, Sx and Sy, as:

𝛥𝑧(𝑥_𝑖𝑗, 𝑦_𝑖𝑗) = 3𝑁𝑘𝑤 2𝜋𝑎𝑏𝐻√1 − ( 𝑥𝑖𝑗 𝑎) 2 − (𝑦𝑖𝑗 𝑏) 2 √𝑠𝑥2(𝑥𝑖𝑗, 𝑦𝑖𝑗) + 𝑠𝑦2(𝑥𝑖𝑗, 𝑦𝑖𝑗) Δ𝑥𝑗 𝑣0 (4) x y 0 Δx(y) Δy adhesion region slip region V strip j element i b a Rail Wheel Discretized points Figure 5. 2: Contact patch at the wheel/rail interface together with the slip region.

The total wheel wear within a strip j, 𝛥𝑧_𝑗, is obtained by summing the wear depth of the elements along the strip [143]. Since the 2-dimensional wear distribution along the wheel circumference is of interest, the maximum wear depth Δ𝑧 = max( Δ𝑧𝑗) across all the strips is taken

as the wear depth of each discrete point in the wheel circumference.

Owing to strong nonlinearities in the wear process, the wear coefficient kw in the Archard model may vary considerably. The variations in the coefficient are generally presented by a wear chart in terms of the normal contact pressure p and the slip velocity S on the basis of measurements [143]. In the present study, the growth trend of wheel polygonalization is the primary focus and the simulations of dynamic wheel/rail contact forces are limited only to the tangent track at a constant forward speed rather than the curved track. Since the sliding region within the contact patch is expected to be very small, a constant value of the wear coefficient is assumed as, kw = 1×10-4 _[27,141].

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Owing to the large computational demand of the coupled vehicle-track dynamic model together with the wear calculations, the simulations during each iteration were limited to a small operating distance considering only 15 wheel revolutions, as suggested in [27,141]. The wheel wear obtained from responses at the wheel-rail interface, namely, the wheel-rail contact forces, creepage and size of the sliding region, is thus regarded as the short term wear. The wear accumulation over long operating distances is predicted through repeated iterations, as shown in Fig.5.1. The measurements of the wheel profiles as a function of the distance suggest nearly linear growth in wheel polygonalization during the initial travel distances following the wheel re-profiling [173]. The rate of growth, however, increases more rapidly with further increase in the travel distance. It is assumed that the wear accumulation varies nearly linearly with the operating distance over a relatively short distance of 550 km considered during a given iteration. This approach has also been suggested in [171] on the basis of measurements obtained in the wheels of a Amfleet vehicle. The short term wear predicted from the Archard model is thus scaled by a factor (550 km/distance traveled in 15 wheel revolutions at a given forward speed) to estimate the wear depth accumulation over the operating distance of 550 km. This process serves as one iterative step in the long-term wear iterative scheme, and the wear accumulation in a relative long period can be obtained by repeating this process for each 550 km distance, assuming piece-wise linear growth in wear with increasing distance.

Furthermore, in each of the subsequent iterative step, the position of the wheel with respect to the rail is altered, and the direction of motion of the vehicle is reversed alternatively. This approach is considered to more realistically represent the routine operation of a train [25,27,141]. Moreover, the simulations are limited to the tangent track alone, as in the case of various reported studies [23,24,25,26,27,141], and the minimum wear depth is subtracted from the total wear to obtain wear magnitude, which is superimposed to the wheel circumference.