On some new aspects of contact dynamics with application in railway engineering

The paper is devoted to the study of several dynamical phenomena of contact problems, where the wheel/rail motion is connected with an oscillating load caused by corrugation, poligonalisation and other irregularities of rails or wheels. It will be shown that even if the wheel center moves with constant speed, the load applied by contact forces moves with variable speed, thus crossing critical resonance boundaries. Some problems studied by the authors in previous works are revisited.