Communications - Scientific Letters of the University of Zilina 2005, 7(2):38-45 | DOI: 10.26552/com.C.2005.2.38-45

Contact Area and Normal Stress Determination on Railway Wheel/Rail Contact

Tomas Lack¹, Juraj Gerlici¹

¹ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Department of Transport and Manipulation Technology, University of Zilina, Slovakia

It is important to study the field of railway wheel /rail contact area from the point of view of stress distribution for further investigation of running behavior of a vehicle when running on a rail track. There is a contact of two spatial geometrically defined bodies, which have characteristic material properties, by a power effect of a vehicle through the wheel on the rail. The contact point is transformed into the contact area as a result of the pressure of the bodies against each other. It is possible to acquire the image of the contact area and the stress which appears at the contact as a result of the application of a known calculation method or to set up own calculation methods. The paper deals with theoretical grounds of two computational methods. They are the Hertz method and strip method (according to Johnson [5]). The results of the contact area and normal stress numerical computation made by authors of the paper are stated and compared with the above mentioned methods and the results of the contact area and normal stress numerical computation made by the authors of the paper are stated and compared with the methods in references [7].) The contribution of the paper is to present the authors' computational results and compare the results with published results of other authors [7]. The authors reached the results with the support of their own computational program. The results are the base for other tangential contact stress research computations and base for other vehicle dynamics simulation computation in the future.

Keywords: no keywords

Published: June 30, 2005  Show citation