Thermal damage caused by frictional heat of rolling-sliding contact is one of the most important failure forms of wheel and rail.Many studies of wheel-rail frictional heating have been devoted to the temperature field,but few literatures focus on wheel-rail thermal stress caused by frictional heating.However,the wheel-rail creepage is one of important influencing factors of the thermal stress.In this paper,a thermo-mechanical coupling model of wheel-rail rolling-sliding contact is developed using thermo-elasto-plastic finite element method.The effect of the wheel-rail elastic creepage on the distribution of heat flux is investigated using the numerical model in which the temperature-dependent material properties are taken into consideration.The moving wheel-rail contact force and the frictional heating are used to simulate the wheel rolling on the rail.The effect of the creepage on the temperature rise,thermal strain,residual stress and residual strain under wheel-rail sliding-rolling contact are investigated.The investigation results show that the thermally affected zone exists mainly in a very thin layer of material near the rail contact surface during the rolling-sliding contact.Both the temperature and thermal strain of rail increase with increasing creepage.The residual stresses induced by the frictional heat in the surface layer of rail appear to be tensile.When the creepage is large,the frictional heat has a significant influence on the residual stresses and residual strains of rail.This paper develops a thermo-mechanical coupling model of wheel-rail rolling-sliding contact,and the obtained results can help to understand the mechanism of wheel/rail frictional thermal fatigue.
The running safety of high-speed trains has become a major concern of the current railway research with the rapid development of high-speed railways around the world.The basic safety requirement is to prevent the derailment.The root causes of the dynamic derailment of highspeed trains operating in severe environments are not easy to identify using the field tests or laboratory experiments.Numerical simulation using an advanced train–track interaction model is a highly efficient and low-cost approach to investigate the dynamic derailment behavior and mechanism of high-speed trains.This paper presents a three-dimensional dynamic model of a high-speed train coupled with a ballast track for dynamic derailment analysis.The model considers a train composed of multiple vehicles and the nonlinear inter-vehicle connections.The ballast track model consists of rails,fastenings,sleepers,ballasts,and roadbed,which are modeled by Euler beams,nonlinear spring-damper elements,equivalent ballast bodies,and continuous viscoelastic elements,in which the modal superposition method was used to reduce the order of the partial differential equations of Euler beams.The commonly used derailment safety assessment criteria around the world are embedded in the simulation model.The train–track model was then used to investigate the dynamic derailment responses of a high-speed train passing over a buckled track,in which the derailmentmechanism and train running posture during the dynamic derailment process were analyzed in detail.The effects of train and track modelling on dynamic derailment analysis were also discussed.The numerical results indicate that the train and track modelling options have a significant effect on the dynamic derailment analysis.The inter-vehicle impacts and the track flexibility and nonlinearity should be considered in the dynamic derailment simulations.
