Wheel-rail contact models in the presence of switches and crossings

International audienceMultibody codes are widely used to model and study the operation of railway vehicles onrealistic track, where the wheel-rail contact model is the key to represent the vehicle-track interactionforces. However, the development and implementation of wheel-rail contact models in multibodycodes remain two active research topics, aiming at improving the accuracy of numerical results andcomputational efficiency of the dynamics analysis. The realism of numerical results is challengedwhen considering switches and crossings (S&C), where the most adverse wheel-rail contactconditions occur. This paper presents a benchmark study where the performance of the multibodycodes MUBODyn, VOCO and VI-Rail are assessed using three case scenarios that involve typicalcontact conditions observed in S&C. A focused description of the relevant methods to determine thewheel-rail contact forces is presented for each software. The three scenarios considered in this workhave been designed to represent typical challenging contact conditions observed in S&C, i.e.conformal contact, contact with a sharp edge, and impact loads. The scenarios proposed in this workare fully described, making them easily reproducible. The agreement between results is discussed inthe framework of the methods implemented in each code. This work highlights the impact of wheelrailcontact methods on the results as well as on the computational efficiency of the multibody codes