DLR’s Vehicle System Dynamics group has a long tradition in the computational analysis of railway vehicles’ dynamics. The group’s main focus used to be on the development of software tools for the efficient analysis of general mechanical systems with a special emphasis on the dynamics of ground vehicles like automobiles, railway vehicles and aircraft landing gears. The respective research activ...

Wheel out-of-roundness (OOR) inevitably jeopardizes the safety of railway operations. Regular visual inspection and checking by experienced workers are the commonly adopted practices to identify wheel defects. However, the defects may not be spotted in time. The paper puts forward a new method to real-time monitor wheel OOR based on PVDF strain sensor. Track strain response upon wheel-rail inte...

Wheel defects on trains, such as flat wheels and out-of-roundness, inevitably jeopardize the safety of railway operations. Regular visual inspection and checking by experienced workers are the commonly adopted practice to identify wheel defects. However, the defects may not be spotted in time. Therefore, an automatic, remote-sensing, reliable, and accurate monitoring system for wheel condition ...

Methods for multibody modelling and simulation should accurately replicate the dynamic behaviour of rail-wheel interface including precise values for wheel-rail contact positions. This paper studies the development of a novel 3-D wheel-rail contact model which is used for dynamic simulation of a suspended wheelset with parameters listed for a typical Mark IV coach. The contact point locations o...

Apart from regular wheel wear such as decreasing wheel diameters and reduced flange thicknesses and heights, wheel flats (WF) and oval wheels (or OOR, Out-Of-Roundness) are the most common wheelset problems for railway vehicles. Within the FP7 Research Project “Saferail”, APT has developed an innovative wheelset monitoring system so-called “Wheel flat and Out of Roundness Monitoring (WORM) syst...

The purpose of this paper is to study the behavior of elastic-plastic stresses under severe drag braking. A railway wheel performs three tasks, aiding in trian movement, supporting the car load, and acting as a brake drum. Finite element computer programs are developed for elasto-plastic stress analysis. An attempt is made here to find an improved fillet profile of the wheel with the intention ...

This paper discusses the use of Linear Mixed Models (LMM) and Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to predict the wear and damage trajectories of railway wheelsets for a fleet of modern multiple unit trains. The wear trajectory is described by the evolution of the wheel flange thickness, the flange height and the tread diameter; whereas the damage trajectory is assessed through the probabilit...