Development Status and Prospect of Rail Grinding Technology for High Speed Railway

Abstract

Rails in service are unavoidably prone to suffer from kinds of defects such as corrugation, crack, spalling and lipping, leading to serious influence to its life and train's safety. Rail grinding has been widely recognized as an effective and general means to remove the flaws, restrain the rolling contact fatigue, improve the wheel-rail contact condition, extend the rail's service life, and increase running stability, safety as well as passengers' comfort. Three kinds of rail grinding strategies are outlined, and the rail grinding technologies for high speed railways are systematically divided into the facing grinding by abrasive wheel, the peripheral grinding by abrasive wheel, the milling and grinding compound process, the high speed grinding by abrasive wheel and the abrasive belt grinding. Then the basic principle, the related research at home and abroad, and the corresponding typical rail grinding equipments for every technology are reviewed in detail. Finally, the development trend is pointed out that the rail grinding equipments for high speed railways advance towards intellectualization, high efficiency, diversification and greenization, and the rail grinding technologies progress with the continuous infiltration of advanced manufacturing philosophy. Meanwhile, the autonomous high-end rail grinding equipments should be developed to comprehensively upgrade the rail maintenance level of the high speed railways.