On the polygonal wear evolution of locomotive wheels due to wheel/rail flexibility and its mitigation measures

Abstract Wheel polygonal wear can immensely worsen wheel/rail interactions and vibration properties of the train and track, and ultimately, lead to the shortening of service life of railway components. At present, wheel/rail medium- or high-frequency frictional interactions are perceived as an essential reason of the high-order polygonal wear of railway wheels, which are potentially resulted by the flexible deformations of the train/track system or other external excitations. In this work, the effect of wheel/rail flexibility on polygonal wear evolution of locomotive wheels is explored with aid of the long-term wheel polygonal wear evolution simulations, in which different flexible modeling of the wheel/rail coupled system is implemented. Further, the mitigation measures for the polygonal wear of locomotive wheels are discussed. The results point out that the evolution of polygonal wear of locomotive wheels can be veritably simulated with consideration of the flexible effect of both wheelset and rails. Execution of mixed-line operation of locomotives and application of multi-cut wheel re-profiling can effectively reduce the development of wheel polygonal wear. This research can provide a deepgoing understanding of polygonal wear evolution mechanism of locomotive wheels and its mitigation measures.