Metamodel for elasto-plastic wheel–rail contact with application to damage in a railway crossing

Paper in proceeding, 2018

A cross-disciplinary and iterative simulation methodology, integrating several numerical tools, for predicting the long-term damage in rail profiles of a railway crossing is described. To reduce computational effort, two simplifications are introduced: (i) To accurately represent traffic conditions in the field, a load collective accounting for statistical distributions of worn wheel profile, vehicle speed and wheel–rail friction coefficient is generated by Latin hypercube sampling and used as input in multibody simulations (MBS) of vehicle–track dynamic interaction. (ii) Based on the output from the MBS simulations, a tuned Hertzian-based metamodel for wheel–rail normal contact accounting for elasto-plastic material behaviour is applied to calculate the contact stress and contact patch size at discretized positions along and across the crossing rail. The metamodel allows for a vast reduction of simulation time compared to the original finite element model as it is given in analytical form.