Traction and wear mechanisms during roll-slip contact

Abstract

In the transportation industry every vehicle that makes contact with the road and propels itself, is subjected to roll-slip in the wheel-road interface. Therefore a good understanding of this phenomenon is important. This article describes roll-slip contacts in general, with extra attention for the wheel-rail contact which is commonly used. Firstly the contact area and the pressure distribution that occur when a normal load is applied between two bodies is discussed. On this base, the traction mechanisms for static and rolling configurations are shown. Lastly, wear mechanisms and two different wear maps are shown which are very useful and commonly used in wear mapping of roll-slip contacts. A good agreement with field measurements can be obtained.