The effect of railway wheel wear on reprofiling and service life

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this study is to analyze how wheel wear affects the wheel reprofiling and service life and evaluate if these aspects can be improved by a new optimal wheel profile design. The NSGA-II multi-objective optimization algorithm was used to generate three optimal wheel profiles that are used alongside the current BRA profile for this analysis. After the optimization process, wear simulation was done to verify if the profiles performance will be maintained over time and to analyze how the worn profile shape affects reprofiling and service life. To quantify this, the worn profiles are used to simulate the reprofiling process in order to estimate the wheel’s expected service life according to the wheels geometric tolerances. For this railway, an increase of at least 17% of service life can be expected by reducing the hollow wear maintenance limit from 3 mm to 2.5 mm while an increase of at least 29% can be expected from changing the limit from 3 mm to 2 mm. Keywords Wheel profile design Wheel optimization Wear simulation Reprofile simulation Wheel life estimation Wear analysis.