Iron oxide and water paste rheology and its effect on low adhesion in the wheel/rail interface

Abstract

The “wet-rail” phenomenon results in low adhesion between wheel and rail throughout the year, occurring transiently on a slightly wet, or drying railhead. It has been previously proposed that it is caused by a mixture of iron oxides and small amounts of water (from dew or precipitation) on the railhead that form a friction reducing paste. This paper outlines a novel combination of rheology, modelling and experimental work using a twin disc test rig to determine how the rheology of this iron oxide paste affects adhesion. The yield strength of different types of iron oxides, along with solid oxide fraction of the friction reducing paste, was assessed and used as an input into an “adhesion model” for assessing water and oxide suspensions. The rheological and modelling results were compared against very low adhesion recorded in twin disc experimental validation when simulating the wet-rail phenomenon.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	White, B. Kempka, R. Laity, P. Holland, C. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0913-2221 Six, K. Trummer, G. Buckley-Johnstone, L. Lewis, R. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4300-0540
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Friction; Rheology; Wheel/rail interface; Iron oxide
Dates:	Published: March 2022 Published (online): 20 December 2021 Accepted: 6 December 2021
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Sheffield) The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Mechanical Engineering (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	05 Jan 2022 13:58
Last Modified:	05 Jan 2022 13:58
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1007/s11249-021-01549-0
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:182065

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Iron oxide and water paste rheology and its effect on low adhesion in the wheel/rail interface

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