A Review of Wheel-Rail Contact Mechanics for Railway Vehicles

Abstract

The dynamic behaviour of a railway vehicle is mainly depending on how the interaction of wheel and rail is taking place in running operation and what is the accuracy and efficiency of the applied contact models. Contact mechanics of railway vehicle is keyed with the history of the wheel-rail contact mechanics. For a designer of braking and traction control systems, it is essential to go through the fundamental knowledge of forces produced due to contact of wheel-rail and geometric constraints as well as moments to assess the wheel-rail wear and to evaluate the ride performance indices. This article gives a brief review to the evolution and present scenario of the previously published contact theories to get rid of the wheel-rail contact problems. The key theories which have most attention to solve normal contact problems are Hertzian contact theory as well as non-Hertzian contact theory, whereas, to tackle the problems related to tangential contact, linear as well as non-linear theories proposed by Kalker, theory proposed by Polach, FASTSIM, CONTACT etc are considered in this paper. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of past studies based on experiments to study various contact models.