Review of conformal wheel/rail contact modelling approaches: towards the application in rail vehicle dynamics simulation

The paper provides a review of modelling approaches for conformal wheel/rail rolling contact, with a focus on contact models in the context of railway vehicle dynamics simulation. Firstly, an overview is provided of conformal rolling contact between elastically deformable solids in a broad perspective, together with issues specific to wheel/rail contact. We highlight the increased complexity of conformal wheel/rail contact conditions compared to nonconformal ones, and describe the main tasks involved with the mathematical modelling of the conformal case. The approaches are summarised that are found in the present state-of-the-art, with a focus on the trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency that is highly relevant to vehicle dynamics simulation. Finally, the paper proposes some challenges and future research directions. It is hoped that this review may be of help to researchers interested in developing new conformal wheel/rail contact algorithms for application in rail vehicle dynamics simulation.