Determination of Wheel-Rail Contact Characteristics by Creating a Special Program for Calculation

Abstract

The authors in this paper describe the steps of creating a special program in GUI tool in Matlab. The program is designed to calculate the main properties of wheel-rail contact zone, such as: contact ellipse dimensions, normal stress and friction coefficients. All the relevant equations, which were introduced by different researchers, are firstly presented and modified to be applicable to the programming environment, and then the program was built. In the end, the program working quality is discussed and some expected future developments on this program are suggested. The proposed program can make the comparison between theoretical and experimental results, when they are available, easier and faster.