ABSTRACT
The mechanism of railway wheel polygonalization resulting from uneven wear is a challenging problem that has not been resolved perfectly. A practical method for simulating the evolution of wheel polygonalization has been developed by the authors and is presented in this paper with the aim of providing a tool to investigate the mechanism of wheel polygonalization. FASTSIM is combined with the Archard wear model to accomplish the wear calculation. A parametric and automatic simulating procedure has been set up in Matlab with co-simulation in Simpack. The basic feature of the wheel polygonalization development due to three different kinds of excitations are demonstrated respectively by using a simple wheelset/flexible-track model.
