An innovative wheel-rail contact model for multibody applications

In this work an innovative elastic wheel-rail contact model is presented. The model considers the wheel and the rail as elastic deformable bodies and requires numerical solution of Navier's elasticity equation. The contact between wheel and rail has been described by means of suitable analytical contact conditions. The contact model was subsequently inserted into a multibody model of a benchmark railway vehicle (the Manchester Wagon) in order to obtain a complete model of the wagon. The complete model has been implemented in the Matlab/Simulink environment. Numerical simulations of the vehicle dynamics have been carried out on many different railway tracks with the aim of evaluating the performance of the model. The main objective of the authors is to achieve a better integration between the differential and multibody modeling. This kind of integration is almost absent in the literature (especially in the railway field) due to the computational cost and to the memory consumption. It is, however, very important as only differential modeling allows accurate analysis of the contact problem (in terms of contact forces, position and shape of the contact patch, stresses and strains), while multibody modeling is generally accepted as the current standard for studying railway dynamics. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.