ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: In fixed crossings, the wheel has to change running from one of the wing rails to the crossing nose or vice versa. It thus causes an impact leading to high contact forces, contact pressures and slip. Different types of steels are used for the crossings. Manganese steel is widely used and shows significant geometry change (adaption) in service. With dynamic finite element (FE) models, it has been shown that the crossing’s geometry might adapt towards a profile with less stresses in the contact patch and thus explain the good suitability of Manganese steel for crossings. In this work, measured geometries of a Manganese crossing are used in the explicit FE model and the difference of the dynamic response (impact forces on the crossing nose) and the arising stresses (contact pressure on crossing nose) are studied for the initial and a run-in geometry for elastic material behavior.
