Abstract Wheelset yaw motion significantly affects wheel-rail non-Hertzian contact behaviour, but currently, few wheel-rail normal contact models consider this issue. In this paper, a simplified wheel-rail contact model is built to study the wheel-rail non-Hertzian normal contact problem considering the yaw angle. First, three basic assumptions for the approximate calculation of this problem are proposed and are validated by using results calculated by Kalker's variational method (KVM), and the approximate expression of the wheel-rail non-Hertzian contact problem considering the yaw angle is obtained based on these assumptions. Then, the approximate expression is applied to the MKP (Modified Kik–Piotrowski) contact model, and an improved MKP model that considers the wheelset yaw angle is proposed, i.e., the MKP-YAW model. Compared with the results calculated by KVM, the computational accuracy of the proposed MKP-YAW model in calculating the wheel-rail contact considering the yaw angle is similar to that of the MKP contact model in calculating the wheel-rail contact without considering the yaw angle.

中文翻译：

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偏航角影响下求解轮轨非赫兹法向接触问题的简化模型

摘要 轮对偏航运动显着影响轮轨非赫兹接触行为，但目前很少有轮轨法向接触模型考虑这个问题。本文建立了一个简化的轮轨接触模型来研究考虑偏航角的轮轨非赫兹法向接触问题。首先，提出该问题近似计算的三个基本假设，并利用Kalker变分法(KVM)的计算结果进行验证，得到考虑偏航角的轮轨非赫兹接触问题的近似表达式基于这些假设。然后，将该近似表达式应用于MKP（Modified Kik-Piotrowski）接触模型，并提出了一种考虑轮对偏航角的改进MKP模型，即MKP-YAW模型。