Makoto AKAMA, Yuma TAKAHASHI
The Fifth International Conference on Railway Technology (Railways 2022), Aug 23, 2022, Elsevier, Civil-Comp Press
In this study, we conducted a series of twin-disc wear and fatigue tests and FE
simulations of the tests. The results are as follows.
In the wet conditions, the wear rate increased when the rolling direction of the
wheel disc was reversed. In contrast, in the dry conditions, the wear rate was much
higher than in the wet conditions, however, it changed little before and after the
reversal. The Archard model could not explain the increase in wear rate after the
reversal in wet conditions, because the model does not take into account the
delamination wear induced by the fluid.
Some discs after the test were sectioned and photographed to observe the crack
morphologies and microstructural changes by optical metallography. In wet
conditions, when the wheel disc was reversed, the cracks clearly tended to propagate
parallel to the surface, and the resulting long and thin wear sheets delaminated. In this
case, the crack is filled with fluid just before its mouth reaches the contact area
between the wheel and rail discs, whereupon the mouth is sealed. Therefore, the fluid
is trapped in the crack and acts as a lubricant to reduce the friction coefficient, and
cracks tend to propagate easily and large delamination sheets are apt to form.
In order to explain the increase in wear rate after the reversal under wet conditions,
CTSDs were obtained by FE analyses. In the wet conditions, the ΔCTSD after the
reversal was almost twice as large as that before the reversal. This means that the
amount of crack propagation after the reversal is higher than that before the reversal.
In contrast in the dry conditions, the ΔCTSD is almost the same before and after the
reversal. Therefore, the amount of crack propagation before and after the reversal is
considered to be almost the same.