Technology Digests / Wheel Profile Wear Trending

TD23-019

November 2, 2023
Authors
  • Matthew Witte
  • Kenny Morrison
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Key Findings

  • For the analyzed wheel population, wear rates of individual wheels appear to be sufficiently consistent to support predictions of useful remaining service life in terms of time or mileage.
  • Individual wheel wear rates can vary dramatically from the median wear rate. Defining the root causes of this variability was outside the scope of the current effort, but the causes likely include parameters such as car type, axle position, service loading, routes, and car condition.
  • The initial investigation only considered cars with a high WPD pass frequency, which limited the equipment population.

Wheel Profile Wear Trending

MxV Rail analyzed wheel profile detector (WPD) data obtained from Association of American Railroads (AAR) subsidiary Railinc to investigate wheel wear trends. Wear rate slopes were determined for all axle positions in hopper and gondola cars. For this population, the range of wear rate varied greatly per wear parameter, but for individual wheelsets, each wear parameter showed consistent trends. BACKGROUND Supported by the AAR’s’ Strategic Research Initiatives (SRI) program, MxV Rail performed this study to better understand how to predict the end of the useful life of wheels based on analysis of WPD data. For this analysis, MxV Rail created a subset of WPD data by selecting those freight railcars that most frequently passed any single WPD. The set contained the top 10,000 railcars that passed by any WPD site, ranked by visit frequency. This selection method populates the data set with the highest number of cars that have the…