Keywords: wheel, rail, wear maps, pin-on-disc testing.

Wear in the railway wheel and rail contact is very closely related to the safety, maintenance and life cycle cost for the railway industry. An accurate prediction of wear is very important. Wear maps are commonly used as an input for simulating and predicting wheel/rail wear. These maps are often formulated for dry, unlubricated wheel/rail contacts at room temperature. In this study, wear maps were set up for different levels of humidity, contact pressure, sliding velocity and temperature, as well as with and without lubricant/oxide layers. Increasing the accuracy of wear maps requires separate maps for wheel tread/rail head and wheel flange/rail gauge contacts because there are significant differences in the contact conditions that cannot be included in a general wear map. The mild wear regime can be further divided into different areas instead of one constant wear coefficient as a result of environmental conditions and oxide layers.

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