Ricerc@Sapienza

UNICO4RAIL aims to contribute to the development and deployment of a user-friendly and open and validated methodology and tool for the use of railway stakeholders. This tool would enable the quantification of the impacts (wear rate, crack propagation rate, track settlement rate, energy consumption, sound power level, etc.) through the entire life cycle of the train/infrastructures (investment, maintenance and operation) and the comparison between different scenarios through simulation. It will include to develop, test and validate a cost modelling methodology valid and widely accepted, which can reflect and quantify the global impact of running gear performance on the rail system economics, where the calculations will be able to consider, with various level of approximation, the different stakeholders¿ viewpoints and to allow searching possible common win-win effects. The modules will be: 1) an infrastructure module analyzing different infrastructure problematica due to deterioration rate and physical variables and related with the unavailability of the infrastructure due to maintenance work caused by the vehicles, 2) an energy module accounting for the energy consumption of auxiliary bogie components and its impacts onto the CO2 emissions, input for Life Cycle Cost (LCC) calculation, 3) a noise module to calculate its influence on comfort issues and the LCC, 4) a vehicle module to asses affordable wheel diameter reduction due to re-profiling, including wear calculation procedure.
The model will setup and provide with a set of default reliable values for calculations as fixed input parameters for friction coefficient, infrastructure parameters, etc.
The main reference studies will be those concerning the Universal Cost Model developed in the lighthouse H2020 project ROLL2RAIL.