Simulation of the Cooling Process of Railways Under Natural Conditions

TThe relevance of the topic is confirmed by the increasing needs due to increased research of railway tracks in terms defined in millions of tons-kilometers; this affects the need to maintain the upper structure of the track (UST) in working condition. And it, in turn, depends on the technology and its observance when laying the railway track. At the same time, there is practically no technology that allows to increase the productivity and quality of work performed in the summer period, provided that the rail is located in the temperature range outside the permissible range. The article is devoted to the creation of a methodology for calculating the cooling process of a rail lash, determining its cooling time from an initial temperature of 70 °C to an ambient temperature of 35 °C under natural conditions (in air, without exposure to cooling sources). A method for calculating the unsteady two-dimensional temperature field of rail lashes during cooling is presented. To calculate the finite difference method, a program was written in the Visual Basic programming language, which was subsequently compared with SolidWorks Simulation. As a result of calculations, it was found out that its own software is not inferior to its foreign counterpart in the quality of reliability of the results obtained. It has also been established that the process taking place under the set conditions has a certain inertia and for some sites begins after a certain period of time. The calculated data were compared with each other using a graphical method.