Challenges and methodology for pre-processing measured and new rail profiles to efficiently simulate wheel-rail interaction in switches and crossings

This paper describes a methodology developed to systematically pre-process rail profile data from switches and crossings for railway vehicle dynamics simulation. The methodology accepts two data sources, unworn geometries from CAD drawings or worn geometries from digitised track measurements. The method addresses key challenges with the relative positioning and quality improvement of the input data and explains the necessary steps to ensure compatibility with the interpolation schemes used to represent the rail profile in certain multibody software. The case studies presented show how small misalignments in the processed digitised measurements affect simulation results and how simulations can help understand the qualitative evolution of switches and crossings rail profiles in a used track. This paper concludes that one of the most challenging tasks remains the automation of rail pre-processing for measured data because it is difficult to correct vertical and lateral misalignments of the profile cross-sections without a reference system.