A framework of high-order wheel polygonal wear mitigation for China's high-speed trains

High-order wheel polygonal wear is a significant concern on China’s high-speed trains; thus far, no satisfactory solution to prevent polygonal wear has been provided. In this study, a simplified vehicle-track coupling dynamic model was established, and the frequency response functions (FRF) of the wheel-rail force were obtained under multiple wheelsets conditions. After integrating a wheel-rail wear model, the rail localized bending modes (RLBM) were recognized as critical factors for the amplitude-frequency and phase-frequency properties of the wheel-rail force response and further gave rise to the growth of high-order polygonal wear. Consequently, rail dynamic vibration absorbers (DVA) were introduced into the vehicle-track coupling dynamic model as single-degree-of-freedom rigid bodies arranged at equal intervals along the track. The influencing mechanism of rail DVAs on the rail localized bending resonance, as well as the resulting polygonal wear, was investigated in detail. Results suggested that the rail localized bending resonance could be easily suppressed when the tuned frequency of the rail DVAs approaches the resonance frequency. However, due to newly generated resonance peaks, the polygonal wear was observed to persist. The phase-frequency property of the wheel-rail force response is a determining contributor to the growth trend of polygonal wear; therefore, the rail-tuned DVA should be designed to force the phase lag out of the positive growth region, namely 90° to 270°. Our results indicated that a DVA with a tuned frequency of 450 Hz could effectively slow the development of high-order polygonal wear on China’s high-speed trains, and the shorter installation interval of rail DVAs improves the suppression effect. This study proposed a phase-based design rule for rail DVAs to achieve wheel-rail periodic wear mitigation.