Vibro-acoustic characterization of railway wheels

For many years the problem of noise generated by trains has had an increasing importance; in this paper, attention is focused on the noise generated by the train wheels due to their vibration. Today there are many kinds of railway wheels which are affected by different noise generation mechanisms. If the traditional and well known solid wheel is considered, a lot of data is already present in the literature both concerning the vibration and the noise point of view. On the other hand, the widely used resilient wheels are not so well known in their vibratory and acoustic behaviour as in the case of solid ones. The extensive experimentation presented and commented in this paper looks for a confirmation of some literature data first, and then it gives new results. Particularly the vibro-acoustic characterization of different kinds of wheels (both solid and resilient ones) has been carried out, in order to have a comparison between the behaviour of the newly built wheels and the older ones, representing the state of the art. Besides it has been shown that a detailed modal analysis of the suspended wheel coupled to sound measurements can give useful information about the wheel noise emission in its normal operating conditions.