From railway dynamics to wheel/rail contact mechanics, an approach for the modelling of the wheel/rail contact: elasto-plastic response of the railhead

Abstract : This wheel/rail contact study presents a combination of two complementary mechanical fields: railway dynamics and tribology. The first one gives an estimation of the contact forces between wheels and rails because of the movements of the bodies. The multi-body representation is combined with a contact model describing the pressure field at the interface, including the tangential stresses and the sliding hypothesis on discretized patches between wheel and rail. These values are then used as the inputs to finite-element models developed to investigate the rail elasto-plastic response to the action of a rolling wheel. Predicted plastic distortions are compared with those observed on sites.