Calculation and Analysis for High-Power Locomotive Wheel/Rail Contact Stress

The study of relationship between wheel and rail is important for the research of localization of high-power locomotive wheels.Wheel/rail contact stress analysis is the base of wheel-rail contact problem.When wheelset moves,it has different lateral displacement respect to the rail section,that will affect the wheel-rail contact stress directly.Based on nonlinear theory of wheel/rail contact and parallel computing technologies,the large-scale finite element model for wheel/rail contact stress analysis is established and the finite element calculation was completed with network cluster parallel computing environment in Laboratory of Computational Geodynamics,Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,the different contact stress in different lateral displacements was studied.The result demonstrates that plastic deformation take displace in all wheel treads,the plastic deformation arise from about 6mm above the contact surface inside the wheel tread to the contact surface.the length of lateral contact patch and contact area has the same variation tendency as the lateral displacement changes.In most cases the shape of contact patch differs greatly from the Hertz theory-based elliptical assumption as the lateral displacement changes.