Keywords: multibody modelling, railway vehicles, wheel-rail contact, conformal contact.

The simulation of the railway vehicle dynamics needs a reliable and efficient method to determine the location and shape of wheel-rail contact patches. A critical issue in the contact patch detection is the conformal contact case: in railway applications, the conformal contact is a common scenario, particularly in sharp curves and, more generally, when wheel and rail profiles are affected by wear. Conformal contact is characterized by large and complex contact patches and the hypothesis that wheel-rail contact takes place on single geometric points or on elliptic patches is not valid anymore. Furthermore, large conformal contact areas are often curved and not planar.

In this paper the authors present an efficient wheel-rail contact model specially developed for conformal contact that is easy to be employed in the classical railway multibody software. The core of the model is the contact force calculation: the authors propose an improvement of the non-Hertzian model developed by Piotrowski; at the same time, an improvement of the Kalker's FASTSIM algorithm is proposed to evaluate the tangential forces on non-planar contact areas.

This research activity has been carried out in collaboration with AnsaldoBreda S.p.A., which provided the experimental data needed for the preliminary model validation; a further experimental programme based on the wheel-rail forces measurements are scheduled.

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