A fast method for solving conformal rolling contact problems

Abstract

For conformal contact situations, some of the assumptions employed in classical contact theories, such as the flatness of the contact area, lose their validity. Existing conformal contact models are challenged by either accuracy or computational efficiency. With the aim of achieving a balanced trade-off between these contrasting requirements, this paper proposes a new simplified method to solve conformal rolling contact problems, which is based on fast non-Hertzian contact model INFCON and FaStrip. Numerical experiments are performed for two typical wheel/rail conformal contact scenarios to assess the performance of the proposed method, taking as the reference the CONTACT method for conformal contacts. The comparative analyses show that the proposed method is in good agreement with the reference method in terms of the determination of the contact stresses, total forces, and the prediction of wear, whereas the traditional half-space approach fails to capture the main features of the conformal contacts. In addition, the high computational efficiency of the proposed method shows the potential for application in vehicle dynamic simulation and damage analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Wheel–rail contact
• conformal contact
• non-Hertzian contact
• vehicle dynamics
• wear

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Edwin Vollebregt and Prof. Kevin Oldknow for providing the worn profiles used in Sect. 3.1.2, and thank Dr. Edwin Vollebregt for the useful discussion on the determination of the undeformed distances for conformal contact. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their help with improving the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [52108418], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [No. 2682022CG003] and the Open Project funded by the State Key Laboratory of Traction Power, Southwest Jiaotong University [TPL1910].