Keywords: railway wheel, test rig, wheel wear, polygonization, roller rig.

A small-scale test rig to perform experiments on the formation mechanisms of polygonization of railway wheels is built at the Institute for Rail Vehicles and Transport Systems. The functionality is based on imposing a sinusoidal yawing motion on a wheel while it is rolling on a drive disc that represents the rail. The wheel speed and the yaw frequency can be set independently. It is expected to create polygonal wear if a certain ratio of rolling and yaw frequency is set. The first experimental results are presented in this paper. It is shown that the test rig works and that a polygonal pattern is clearly visible on the specimen wheels within 10 minutes of the experiment. The yaw frequency was set in test series such that a third and a fifth polygonization order are expected, respectively. The orders aimed for are not achieved in any of the experiments performed. Instead, the observed orders lie between 9 and 11 instead of 5 and 13 instead of 3. The selected yaw frequency affects how dominant the measured polygon patterns are. The appearance of the wheel treads indicates that the wheels have been plastically deformed and that the usual wear mechanisms present in the wheel-rail interface are insufficiently achieved. The observations of the test series cannot be explained so far, which shows the need for further research in this field. Therefore, the findings on the wear that occurred to the wheels within the experiments are to be used to further develop the test rig and to select reasonable parameter variations for further tests.

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