An innovative elastic wheel – rail contact model

In this paper the authors intend to present an innovative elastic wheel – rail contact model. The model considers the wheel and the rail as elastic deformable bodies and requires the numerical solution of the Navier’s elasticity equation. The contact between wheel and rail has been described by means of suitable analytical contact conditions. Subsequently the contact model has been inserted within the multibody model of a benchmark railway vehicle (the Manchester Wagon) in order to obtain a complete model of the wagon. The whole model has been implemented in the Matlab/Simulink environment and 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. In conclusion, the main purpose of the authors is to achieve a better integration between the differential modeling and the multibody modeling, almost absent in literature (especially in the railway field).