Thermo-mechanical coupling analysis of three-dimensional full-size wheel/rail contact at different slip ratios

Xiaoju  Guo; Tao  Yang; Yunpeng  Wei

doi:10.6180/jase.202603_29(3).0022

Thermo-mechanical coupling analysis of three-dimensional full-size wheel/rail contact at different slip ratios

Xiaoju Guo, Tao Yang, and Yunpeng WeiThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

School of Civil Engineering and Water Resources, Qinghai University, Xining, 810016, China

Received: February 22, 2025
Accepted: May 25, 2025
Publication Date: July 12, 2025

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202603_29(3).0022

A rolling-sliding contact state between wheel and rail appears when a train starts, brakes or passes through long-heavy down grades. During this process, significant damage and thermo-mechanical coupling phenomena occur on contact surface. To analyze this thermo-mechanical phenomena, a detailed three-dimensional full-size wheel/rail interaction model is constructed. The results indicate the contact patch shape of wheel/rail is close to an ellipse, and contact area is 164.3 mm2. The maximum von Mises stress of wheel and rail are 488 MPa and 494 MPa, respectively. The maximum temperature is consistently observed at the center of the contact area under varying wheel/rail rolling-sliding contact conditions. During pure sliding contact, the maximum temperatures on the wheel and rail surfaces reach 1495.8 ^◦C and 594.3 ^◦C respectively. The temperature variation becomes negligible when the point is located beyond 3 mm from the contact interface. The von Mises stress of node is evidently higher than that of pure rolling contact because of the thermal and mechanical load at different slip ratios, and this difference gradually increases with increasing slip ratios. When the slip ratio exceeds 0.75, the thermal strain and plastic strain of the wheel increase rapidly. The findings of this study provide significant insights into the thermo-mechanical coupling phenomena at the wheel/rail interface during train braking.

Keywords: Wheel/rail contact; Thermo-mechanical coupling; Slip ratio; Temperature; Stress

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