Keywords: Chinese high-speed railway, wheel wear, numerical analysis, sensitivity analysis, mesh size, smoothing method.

The modelling for wear profile prediction has been one of the most fundamental tasks in railway engineering science. This paper presents a numerical sensitivity study of a wear prediction model for a high-speed railway application. It firstly introduces the wear prediction model including a vehicle-track coupled model for vehicle dynamical simulation, the local contact model for wheel-rail interaction, and an energetic approach for surface wear evaluation. Afterwards, the parameter setting of the current wear prediction model is presented, consisting of 3 factors, the discretization size of wheel-rail contact patch, the smoothing algorithm, and the depth threshold of each updating step. The results show that, first of all, the influence of patch discretization size is dominating, that in some cases when the friction coefficient is rather high, the determination of the slip can be skipped when choosing an improper value of mesh size. In those cases, the suggested mesh size could be deficient in the cases of high friction coefficient. Secondly, the variation of smoothing algorithms makes a difference in the wear depth evolution, but the influence is slight. Thirdly, the influence of the depth threshold is remarkable on both the efficiency and the accuracy. A trade-off between accuracy and efficiency should be balanced at the specific task.

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