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Abstract
Multibody train analysis is used increasingly by railway operators whenever a reliable and time-efficient method to evaluate the contact between wheel and rail is needed; particularly, the wheel–rail contact is one of the most important aspects that affects a reliable and time-efficient vehicle dynamics computation. The focus of the approach proposed here is to carry out such tasks by means of online wheel–rail elastic contact detection. In order to improve efficiency and save time, a main analytical approach is used for the definition of wheel and rail surfaces as well as for contact detection, then a final numerical evaluation is used to locate contact. The final numerical procedure consists in finding the zeros of a nonlinear function in a single variable. The overall method is based on the approximation of the wheel surface, which does not influence the contact location significantly, as shown in the paper.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges P. Shackleton for providing the data used in the Manchester contact benchmark comparison.