A study of cyclic thermal-mechanical response between wheel and rail based on fully coupled thermo-elastic-plastic analysis

To investigate the stress and temperature distribution of wheel and rail contact subjected to cyclic loading, a fully coupled thermo-elastic-plastic model combined nonlinear isotropic hardening and kinematic hardening was established firstly in thermodynamics frame. And then, the proposed model was implemented into finite element code ABAQUS by the user subroutine UMAT and HETVAL. A 3D wheel and rail finite element model is constructed and the temperature dependent material parameters are taken into consideration in the finite element simulations. The results show that it is import to reasonably consider full-coupled among stress, temperature and displacement for wheel-rail contact analysis in high speed and heavy haul railways.