Curve squealing of railway wheels occurs erratically in narrow curves with a frequency of about 4 kHz. Squealing is caused by a self-excited stick-slip oscillation in the wheel-rail contact. The mechanism which activates squeal has been analyzed in this PhD project.

The squeal model consists of the first modal forms of an elastic wheel and is equipped with a three-dimensional hard Coulomb contact. Based on this model, a linear stability analysis of the stationary run through a curve is performed for the four wheels of the investigated bogie. The results show that in particular the front inner wheel tends to squeal. A numerical simulation of the system’s differential inclusions performed on the unstable states shows the existence of a self-excited stick-slip oscillation. The computed frequency of the limit cycle agrees well with the measurements.

Measured squealing spectrum

Publications:

Glocker Ch., Cataldi-Spinola E., Leine R.I., Curve squealing of trains: Measurement, modelling and simulation, Journal of Sound and Vibration, Volume 324, Issues 1-2, 10 July 2009, Pages 365-386, ISSN 0022-460X.

Glocker Ch., Cataldi-Spinola E., Stefanelli, Measurement, Modelling and Simulation of Curve Squealing of Trains, Proceedings of the 7th EUROMECH Solid Mechanics Conference (ESMC2009), Lisbon, Portugal, 2009.

Stefanelli, R., Dual, J., Cataldi-Spinola, E., Acoustic modelling of railway wheels and acoustic measurements to determine involved eigenmodes in the curve squealing phenomenon, In Proceedings of 19th Symposium of the International-Association-for-Vehicle-System-Dynamics, Milan, 2005.

Cataldi-Spinola, E., Glocker, Ch., Stefanelli, R., Götsch, M., Eigenfrequency shift of railway wheels due to wear. Proceedings of CFA/DAGA 04, Strasbourg, France, 2004.

Cataldi-Spinola, E., Glocker, Ch., Stefanelli, R., Götsch, M., Influence of the Wheel Diameter on the Curve Squealing of Railway Vehicles. Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Noise Control, Naples, 2003.

Stefanelli R., Dual J., Cataldi-Spinola E.,Götsch M., Investigation of the Influence of Angle of Attack, Lateral Displacement and Moisture on Rails on the Occurrence of Curve Squealing, Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Noise Control, Naples, 2003.