An innovative wheel–rail contact model for multibody applications

In this work an innovative elastic wheel–rail contact model is presented. The model considers the wheel and the rail as elastic deformable bodies and requires numerical solution of Navierʹs elasticity equation. The contact between wheel and rail has been described by means of suitable analytical contact conditions. The contact model was subsequently inserted into a multibody model of a benchmark railway vehicle (the Manchester Wagon) in order to obtain a complete model of the wagon. The complete model has been implemented in the Matlab/Simulink environment. Numerical simulations of the vehicle dynamics have been carried out on many different railway tracks with the aim of evaluating the performance of the model.