Development of an innovative model to study wear evolution considering wheel-rail conformal contact

In this work the authors present a wear model capable to consider conformal contact, very frequent in railway applications, especially in tracks where the curvature radius is limited and the wheel-rail profiles are affected by wear. This type of contact is characterized by more complex contact patch, where the hypotheses of single contact point, planar contact, elliptic contact are not verified. For this reason, the research for contact models, including conformal contact, are a crucial aspect to determine an accurate wear evolution and to optimize the maintenance of wheels and rails.