Steel Wheel FEA

[RickySchoelman]

I trying to run a FEA in Solidworks on a steel wheel on a flat plate and I am having trouble with an infinite amount of stress along the contact area "strip or line" between the plate and wheel, since the steel wheel doesn't compress and provide an area like a rubber wheel would.

Does anyone have any advice on running this FEA or determining what material to use?

 

[Maxham1]

Have you tried refining the mesh in and around the strip? If that helps, then continue to refine the mesh until the results don't change, indicating that you have mesh independence - just an idea that you may have already tried.

Dave

 

[corus]

Given you probably have zero area under the wheel then you'll have infinite stress.
The contact area is generally very small so you're better modelling just a very small angle of the wheel that is directly in contact with the plate, rather than a full or semi partial wheel going back to its centre. That way you can refine the mesh sufficiently to look at the herzian contact stresses under the wheel. A hand calculation would probably be much quicker though unless you have complex loading.

Tata

 

[GregLocock]

I suspect a railway engineer would know the answer. I guess that they ignore it and use an SCF based on the 3d geometry.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

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[loki3000]

there are some standards that define the area of contact between the wheel and rail (don't remember which though).
also i don't think that you are supposed to use fea for that kind of tasks due to reasons mentioned (area) and safety. the calcs were quite straightforward anyway.

 

[kellnerp]

Ricky,

What kind of analysis are you trying to do? Which solver are you using? This is a non-linear contact problem. Can you post your boundary conditions and how you have setup your contact elements?

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[RickySchoelman]

Could you help me out with the simple hand calc?

 

[kellnerp]

Ricky,

Get yourself a copy of Roark & Young. FEA analysts will often use the hand-calcs in this book to check their FEA results. You might be able to borrow a copy from the library just to see what it holds.

It's pretty easy to find the hand calc using Google. Like this

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