An Elastic-Plastic Solver of the Wheel-Rail Contact

Wheel and rail in service undergo continual wear and plastic deformation at the surface, so that in time all wheel profiles will be different. The optimization by grinding a worn rail profile to minimize contact stresses requires the development of a software to reconstruct a rail profile using circular arcs. A working algorithm, able to be incorporated into a computer code, has been developed to solve the stress state in the general case of non-Hertzian contacts. To limit the pressure, an elastic-perfect plastic material has been incorporated into the computer code. The pressure distribution and the corresponding stresses states have been investigated for pure normal loadings, as well as for the combined, normal and tangential loadings. The elastic-plastic analysis model allows fast investigations regarding the influence of different parameters such as load level, contact geometry including the geometry of the worn profiles.