Numerical stability of co-simulation approaches to evaluate wheel profile evolution due to wear

Wear simulation for railway wheel profiles is a complex problem which requires dynamics simulation of the vehicle on a long track and detailed analyses of the contact forces, which have to adopt non-linear methods to simulate the material behaviour. Since the dynamics of the vehicle and the behaviour of the material evolve differently, it is possible to use different codes to solve the problems. Furthermore, when thousands of kilometres are needed to produce wear, the profile wear is usually virtually amplified using wear multipliers to reduce computing time. This process can produce numerical instability if the multipliers and profile update intervals are not chosen appropriately. In this paper, the Simpack multibody code is used to simulate vehicle dynamics and to calculate the wear removed on a reference track, then the MATLAB code is used to smooth the profile and define the update intervals.