Keywords: multibody simulation, railway vehicle dynamics, wear, SIMPACK, wheel-rail contact, co-simulation.

The efficiency of modern computers in the solution of railway vehicle dynamics with multibody codes is currently leading the path towards the development of numerical tools for the evaluation of wear of the wheel profiles starting from the outputs of dynamic simulations. The latter are commonly launched in commercial software packages, which guarantee unbeaten reliability and stability of their numerical solvers, as well as simple user-friendly interfaces. Many commercial multibody codes are currently provided with add-ons for the evaluation of wear of wheel profiles, however the limited number of tuneable parameters can compromise the stability of the simulation. The present paper aims to benchmark the outputs of the SIMPACK Wheel Profile Wear module and to investigate the differences due to the application of the Archard’s law in local form, focusing on different strategies that can be adopted to calculate the slip speed on the contact patch with the FASTSIM algorithm. It is found that recent expressions suggested in the literature for the calculation of the equivalent flexibility should be preferred over the original equation when calculating the slip speed in each cell of the contact patch grid.

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