Influence of Axle Load on the Wear of Railway Wheel Material

This study investigated the influence of axle load on the wear rate of railway wheel material. Excessive wear of wheel/rail materials and reduced service life of the wheel/rail system might be caused by the increase in axle load and traffic volume. Two kinds of rail and wheel steels have been studied against different axle load steps, simulating them for wear performance analysis using multibody simulation software (SIMPACK) and MATLAB programming. The simulation model results are validated against the vehicle’s specifications and wear depth measured on Ethiopia—Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (LRT), and experimental results from the literature. The result shows that the wear rate increases proportionally with the increasing of applied load and that the proportionality coefficient is 0.1393, which has a very good agreement with the experimental results from the works of literature. Likewise, the estimated total tread wear amount after a mileage of 52,000 km is 2% larger than the measured one in LRT, which is indeed an excellent result taking into account the inaccuracy of the wheel diameter gauge used to measure the wheel transversal profile. In normalized UIC 50 kg/m rail and S1002 wheel profile, the wear rate increases linearly from 5110.02, 9997.87, and 18990.17 mm3/km on 11, 21, and 30 tones applied load, respectively. Apparently, on the hardened UIC 60 kg/m and S1002 wheel profiles, the wear rate has been improved by 14.5%, 10.8%, and 7.5% on 11, 21, and 30 tones applied load, respectively, in comparison to normalized rail/wheel match. Briefly, the wheel wear rate is highly influenced by the increasing applied load, referring proportionality coefficient of 0.1393.