Study on active wheelset steering from the perspective of wheel wear evolution

Active wheelset steering promises an attractive cost–benefit ratio and is highly likely to be implemented in the future. Previous studies investigated the steering effect simply through a wear index like wear number. However, a wear index cannot predict how much the material removal on wheels can be reduced, and it is unable to reveal the wear pattern. This paper builds an iterative wear model to predict wheel wear evaluation under the presence of an active steering system. Three active steering schemes are proposed, and they are compared in terms of wheel wear evolution. To quantify the steering effectiveness, two factors are created to, respectively, evaluate economic impacts and satisfaction of three steering schemes. Finally, a simplified method based on traditional wear indices is compared with the established iterative wear calculation method to examine the applicability and tolerance of the simplified method.