Experimental and numerical simulation of wheel-rail adhesion and wear using a scaled roller rig and a real-time contact code

The work shows the use of a scaled roller rig to validate a real time wheel-rail contact code developed to study the wheel rail adhesion and the wear evolution. The code allows the profiles to change at each time step in order to take into account the material loss due to the wear process. The contact code replicates a testing machine composed of a roller rig with a prototype of a single suspended wheelset pressed onto it with a variable load. The roller rig, developed at Politecnico di Torino, is used to validate and optimize the contact code referring to experimental data directly measured in real time. The test bench, in fact, allows measurement of specific kinematical quantities and forces that are elaborated by the real-time code in order to produce numerical results for comparison with the experimental ones. This approach can be applied both to the determination of wheel-rail adhesion and to the wear process. The test rig is also equipped with a laser profilometer that allows measurement of the wheel and rail profiles with a very high accuracy.