THE EFFECT OF COEFFICIENT OF FRICTION BETWEEN RAIL VEHICLE WHEELS AND RAIL TRACK ON OPERATION POWER CONSUMPTION

Abstract

The daily cost of rail operation is increasing due to the increase of rail network size. Therefore, reduction in operation power consumption is important to rail operator in order to fully optimize the daily operation cost. Operation power consumption in rail operation can be divided into 80% traction power such as vehicle propulsion system and 20% non-traction power such as station electrical consumption. Many research has already been carried out on advance traction system such as regenerative breaking storage system, hybrid battery and others; aims to reduce operation power consumption. However, very few of the research address the concern towards track condition and maintenance. This research focus on the interaction between the rail vehicle wheels and the rail track and how the coefficient of friction between these two affects the rail operation power consumption. As rail grinding is an important rail preventive maintenance to improve track surface, indirectly coefficient of friction has shown an improvement that result in reduction of rail operation power consumption. Train resistance can be express in Davis equation, in which the equation is the mathematical model that being use in rail industries to find train performance. Our findings indicate that the application of rail grinding method had successfully reduce the track kinetic coefficient of friction, does result in reducing of 9% in operation power consumption.