Algorithm-based strategy to define an equivalent railway track for wear simulations

Multibody simulations of train dynamics commonly employ generic short tracks to validate and observe the behaviour of wagons in certain conditions. However, for proper wheel wear analysis, the entire railway track should be modelled, increasing computational cost and time to obtain worn profiles and wear parameters. The major novelty of this work is the description of a reproducible algorithm-based methodology to obtain a statistically representative shorter equivalent railway track for wear simulations. The proposed methodology includes combining a real measured track with multibody dynamic simulation. To verify the approach, a case study was conducted on a 505 km-long railway in Brazil. Additionally, two distinct vehicles were employed: a European wagon with a standard gauge and a Brazilian wagon with a meter gauge. The shorter equivalent tracks were compared in terms of worn area and wear depth to the initial track, and the generated tracks were cross-compared between vehicles to verify the robustness of the method. It is observed that wear simulations can be performed more efficiently and effectively, reducing the computational time by at least 94%, while still obtaining accurate results, given that the final equivalent tracks were 18.59 times shorter for the Brazilian model and 22.45 times shorter for the European model comparing to the real track, with the maximum deviation being 6.55% in flange depth and with a maximum root mean-square error (RMSE) of 871 nm.