Calculation of Wear of Railway Wheels with Multibody Codes: Benchmarking of the Modelling Choices

The numerical simulation of wear of railway wheel profiles can be a game changer in the railway field, as it can drive the planning of wheel re-turning operations, thrust the identification of optimized profiles and evaluate the safety of railway vehicles at the early stages of design. Today, commercial multibody codes are provided with dedicated routines that can evaluate the worn profile shape due to the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle. As the outputs of such modules can depend on different user-selectable parameters and modelling choices, it is vital to assess the capabilities of these codes and get a further understanding of the implemented algorithms. This paper aims to benchmark the effects of different modelling parameters and choices, mainly related to the selected wear law and wheel–rail contact method, on the final wear outputs, with special reference to the wear module provided by the SIMPACK commercial multibody code. A relevant novelty of the paper deals with the benchmarking of the wear algorithm available in the commercial code with in-house wear routines, comparing different strategies and choices for the calculation of wear. This allows us to better understand the most critical differences and modelling issues, as well as to highlight possible improvements in wear algorithms that can lead to enhanced numerical stability. More in detail, this work suggests a change in the wear algorithm that proves to be beneficial to removing local wear peaks produced by numerical sources, which could cause instabilities in the computation.