ON STOCHASTIC SIMULATION OF THE WHEEL-PROFILE WEAR PROCESS OF A RAILWAY VEHICLE OPERATING ON A SPECIFIED NETWORK

Abstract

The alteration in wheel and rail profiles due to wear involves considerable vehicle and track-maintenance costs, and influences the loading capacity of the rails, as well as the operation safety and riding comfort of the vehicles. In the past five years, a vehicle dynamics-based numerical procedure was elaborated at the TU of Budapest to predict the wear-caused wheel profile alterations and to maximize the mileage performance by selecting the optimum axle-box guidance stiffnesses in case of traditional running-gears operating on a specified railway line [1]. This paper introduces the fundamental principles and conditions decisive in the dynamical and tribological procedure mentioned, and deals with an extension of it. This extension regards the wheel wear analysis and mileage performance maximization of the vehicle in case of stochastic operation on a given railway network. The network is characterized by its graph. The operation process is described in the framework of a semi-Markovian model [12], [13]. The elaborated stochastic simulation and optimization method is visualised for a simple railway network by introducing the two important two-parameter stochastic fields, namely those of the wheel profile and the mileage performance.