banner.jpg 035 Heat Partition Analyses for Tread Braking on Railway Wheels Manikanta R K Vakkalagadda1 and Vikranth Racherla2 1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India. ravindra.btw@gmail.com 2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India. vikranth.racherla@mech.iitkgp.ernet.in ABSTRACT

A thermal model, using boundary element method is developed to estimate the heat partition at brake block-wheel interface during drag braking with cast iron and composite brake blocks in the absence of rail. Variation of heat fraction entering the wheel as a function of brake block type, brake block-wheel contact angle, braking velocity and wheel radius are studied. Furthermore, temperature profiles of wheel and brake block are obtained from the analyses. Results show that fraction of heat entering the wheel is high in the case of composite brake blocks because of their lower thermal conductivity. Less influence of wheel radius and braking velocity are observed and asymmetry of the temperature in the wheels is limited to smaller depths irrespective of the brake block type. Keywords: Railway wheel, Drag braking, Brake block type, Contact angle, Heat partition.

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