Abstract Railway crossings are subjected to a severe load environment leading to a degradation of rail profiles due to wear and accumulated plastic deformation. This damage is the result of the high magnitudes of contact pressure and traction generated in the wheel–rail contact during each wheel transition between wing rail and crossing nose. An extensive measurement campaign has been carried out at a test site in Austria in a particularly severely loaded crossing manufactured from an explosion depth hardened (EDH) manganese steel grade. For an accumulated traffic load of 65 Mega-Gross-Tonnes (MGT), the evolution of profile degradation for 16 cross-sections along the crossing rail has been recorded on multiple occasions. The results from the measurement campaign are used to validate a previously presented multidisciplinary and iterative simulation methodology for the prediction of long-term rail damage. It is shown that the predicted rail profile degradation exceeds the measured degradation for some of the cross-sections but generally a good qualitative agreement is observed. Possible reasons for the higher predicted damage are the uncertain distribution of traffic at the test site and differences in material properties between the crossing in the field and the test specimens used for calibration of the cyclic plasticity model. The influence of the frequency of updating the rail profiles in the iterative simulation methodology, and the compromise between computational cost and the number of load cases accounted for in the applied load sequence, are addressed.

中文翻译：

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铁路道口的长期钢轨剖面损坏：现场测量和数值模拟

摘要 铁路道口在严酷的载荷环境下，由于磨损和累积塑性变形导致钢轨轮廓退化。这种损坏是由于在翼轨和交叉机头之间的每个车轮过渡期间在轮轨接触中产生的大量接触压力和牵引力的结果。已在奥地利的一个试验场在一个由爆炸深度硬化 (EDH) 锰钢制成的特别重载的十字路口进行了广泛的测量活动。对于 65 兆吨 (MGT) 的累积交通负荷，已多次记录沿交叉轨道的 16 个横截面的剖面退化演变。测量活动的结果用于验证先前提出的用于预测长期铁路损坏的多学科和迭代模拟方法。结果表明，对于某些横截面，预测的轨道轮廓退化超过了测量的退化，但通常观察到良好的定性一致性。预测损伤较高的可能原因是试验现场交通的不确定分布以及现场交叉口与用于校准循环塑性模型的试样之间的材料特性差异。解决了迭代模拟方法中更新轨道轮廓频率的影响，以及计算成本与应用载荷序列中考虑的载荷工况数量之间的折衷。