Simulation of ice under mechanical and thermal load

The contact physics of the wheel-rail contact of a railway vehicle under presence of water and ice at low temperatures is still not completely understood. For the investigation of the particular process in the contact zone a simulation is required, which is able to calculate the normal and tangential contact, the temperature field and the fluid-structural interaction between wheel and rail at low temperatures under presence of snow and ice. For that purpose the behaviour of ice under wheel-rail contact conditions is an important part. In this paper the thermal dynamic model of TSHIJOV [1], [3] for an adiabatic ice probe is updated by the new IAPWS equations of state for water [5] and ice phase Ih [4]. In a first approximation an ice specimen is loaded by specific wheel-rail contact pressure distributions calculated by the half-space formulation to clarify if phase transitions of ice can exist. (© 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)