Final Activity Report Summary - AWARE (Reliable prediction of the wear of railway wheels) The railway system is increasingly becoming a key-player in the European transport policies. This trend results from the rising oil prices and from the urgency for reduction of CO2 emissions, the main responsible for the climate changes. In order to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of the railway networks, the trains have to travel faster, at lower costs and with high levels of safety and comfort. As a consequence, railway and infrastructure companies continuously increase the demands for vehicle requirements. These include the reduction of expenses associated to the maintenance of vehicles and tracks, in order to decrease their life cycle costs.The uncertainties associated to the maintenance intervals of vehicles and tracks and the costs involved in such procedures raise the urgency of acquiring a better understanding on the factors influencing the wear evolution of the railway wheels. Furthermore, for rolling-stock manufacturers become an everyday challenge to respect the client specifications and to check that the vehicles are conform to international standards. In the past, the re-profiling intervals of railway vehicle steel wheels have been scheduled according to designers' experience. Nowadays, more reliable and accurate tools in predicting wheel wear evolution and wheelset lifetime can be used in order to achieve economical and safety benefits. In project AWARE, a computational tool that is able to predict the evolution of the wheel profiles for a given railway system, as a function of the distance run, was developed. The strategy adopted consists of using commercial multibody software to study the railway dynamic problem and a purpose-built code for managing its pre and post-processing data in order to compute the wear.During this project, the developed computational tool was applied to realistic operation scenarios. These studies allowed to identify and to assess the influence on the wheel wear growth of several parameters related to the vehicle characteristics, to the track features and to the trainset service conditions.The wear prediction tool that was developed during project AWARE is of paramount importance to reduce the costs, the time and the risks associated to the development of new technological solutions. In particular, it will allow increasing the precision in estimating the vehicle wheelset life time, one of the most sensible issues during trainset design. Additionally, it can be applied in several simulation scenarios to identify the factors that promote the wear growth and propose integrated solutions that mitigate such problem. Therefore, the results of this project constitute an important contribute to increase the competitiveness of the railway transport with respect to other means of transportation less efficient and more polluting.
