Citation

Negretti D. Veh. Syst. Dyn. 2012; 50(3): 431-448.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/00423114.2011.595804

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Multibody train analysis is used increasingly by railway operators whenever a reliable and time-efficient method to evaluate the contact between wheel and rail is needed; particularly, the wheel-rail contact is one of the most important aspects that affects a reliable and time-efficient vehicle dynamics computation. The focus of the approach proposed here is to carry out such tasks by means of online wheel-rail elastic contact detection. In order to improve efficiency and save time, a main analytical approach is used for the definition of wheel and rail surfaces as well as for contact detection, then a final numerical evaluation is used to locate contact. The final numerical procedure consists in finding the zeros of a nonlinear function in a single variable. The overall method is based on the approximation of the wheel surface, which does not influence the contact location significantly, as shown in the paper.