A new approach for modelling mild and severe wear in wheel-rail contacts

This paper presents a new approach for modelling the wear in wheel-rail contacts for a wide range of test and contact conditions (material pairing, load, creep, lubrication etc.) in the mild and severe wear regimes with one set of model coefficients. The approach is based on a detailed analysis of 56 Twin-Disc experiments in combination with existing knowledge from the literature. The model considers the thickness of the damaged layer caused by severe plastic shear deformations in the near-surface layer of wheel or rail and the maximum shear stress in the contact as the main influencing factors responsible for the observed wear behaviour. In this way, a much better prediction quality can be reached for varying test and contact conditions compared to the state of the art energy dissipation or sliding based approaches. The model includes a low number of model coefficients which are independent of test and contact conditions. •New approach for modelling the wear in wheel-rail contact based on the analysis of a wide range of Twin-Disc experiments.•The data analysis shows that the average wear rate has the best correlation with the maximum shear stress in the contact.•The new wear model consists of two parts: 1st) the damage layer depth part, 2nd) the maximum shear stress part.•The new model can predict the average wear rate of the experimental results under different test and contact conditions.