Dynamic performance of passenger and freight cars on wheels with a new unified profile in their operation on the Ukrainian and European railways

Abstract

The need to renew the Ukrainian railway transport and speed up its integration into the European railway service calls for a new wheel profile that would provide wheel–rail pair compatibility in the operation of freight and passenger cars on the Ukrainian and European railways and facilitate car–rail interaction. This calls, in its turn, for theoretical studies of random car oscillations at various values of wheel–rail pair parameters aimed at evaluating the possibility of using a unified wheel profile for freight and passenger cars with prospective trucks in their operation on the Ukrainian and European railways. This paper presents theoretical estimates of the dynamic performance of a passenger and a freight train with Kryukovsky Railway Car Building Works’ cars with wheels having different profiles: 1) those developed by researchers of the Institute of Technical Mechanics (ITM) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the State Space Agency of Ukraine and 2) the home standard one. An analysis was conducted for trains moving on an elastoviscous inertial tangent track with account for external disturbances caused by geometrical imperfections of rails on the Ukrainian (R65 rails of cant 1/20) and European (UIC60 rails of cant 1/40) railways. It was shown that if wheels with the ITM profiles are used in the passenger and freight cars considered, the dynamic performance on the Ukrainian railways differs little from that on the European railways for service speeds (up to 160 km/h and 120 km/h for passenger and freight cars, respectively). The dynamic performance of these cars does not deteriorate and in some cases even improves in comparison with the use of wheels with the standard profile. Using wheels with the ITM profiles in passenger and freight cars will significantly extend their service life due to wheel wear reduction.