Long-term rail profile damage in a railway crossing: Field measurements and numerical simulations
Journal article, 2021

Railway crossings are subjected to a severe load environment leading to a degradation of rail profiles due to wear and accumulated plastic deformation. This damage is the result of the high magnitudes of contact pressure and traction generated in the wheel–rail contact during each wheel transition between wing rail and crossing nose. An extensive measurement campaign has been carried out at a test site in Austria in a particularly severely loaded crossing manufactured from an explosion depth hardened (EDH) manganese steel grade. For an accumulated traffic load of 65 Mega-Gross-Tonnes (MGT), the evolution of profile degradation for 16 cross-sections along the crossing rail has been recorded on multiple occasions. The results from the measurement campaign are used to validate a previously presented multidisciplinary and iterative simulation methodology for the prediction of long-term rail damage. It is shown that the predicted rail profile degradation exceeds the measured degradation for some of the cross-sections but generally a good qualitative agreement is observed. Possible reasons for the higher predicted damage are the uncertain distribution of traffic at the test site and differences in material properties between the crossing in the field and the test specimens used for calibration of the cyclic plasticity model. The influence of the frequency of updating the rail profiles in the iterative simulation methodology, and the compromise between computational cost and the number of load cases accounted for in the applied load sequence, are addressed.

Switches & crossings

S&C

Plastic deformation

FEM

Wear

Dynamic vehicle–track interaction

Author

Rostyslav Skrypnyk

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Dynamics

Uwe Ossberger

voestalpine VAE GmbH

Björn Pålsson

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Dynamics

Magnus Ekh

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Material and Computational Mechanics

Jens Nielsen

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Dynamics

Wear

0043-1648 (ISSN)

Vol. 472-473 203331

Research into enhanced track and switch and crossing system 2 (In2Track-2)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/826255), 2018-11-01 -- 2021-10-31.

Swedish Transport Administration, 2018-11-01 -- 2021-10-31.

Subject Categories

Tribology

Infrastructure Engineering

Vehicle Engineering

Infrastructure

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

DOI

10.1016/j.wear.2020.203331

More information

Latest update

5/5/2021 2