Fast computation of wear distribution over contact patch

The railway wheel wear prediction is essential in the optimization of the maintenance strategies of the wheel-rail system which have both economic and safety implications. The computation of the stresses across the contact patch is necessary to determine the wear distribution, which makes the wear simulation computationally expensive and challenging. Therefore, a fast wear computation method is highly desirable for wheel wear estimation in the context of multibody railway vehicle dynamics simulations where many contact problems must be solved at each timestep. This paper proposes a fast computation approach to estimating wear distribution over the wheel-rail contact patch. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated with the selected case studies.