Implementation of the Contact Roughness at the Wheel-Rail Contact Model for Locomotive Traction Studies

Abstract This paper introduces a solution to deliver the relation between the contour and real contact areas considering characteristics of surface geometry based on the adaptation of a tribological method [1] for calculation of the real area of contact and the real pressure between two rough surfaces. The implementation in the wheel-rail coupling architecture is kept the same as per the previously developed wheel-rail multibody couplings [2,3] based on the modified Fastsim [4] and Extended Contact [5] algorithms, which allows switching between the previous and new developed coupling for a comparative analysis. The results obtained, and limitations, are stated in this paper.