Urban rail corrugation on curved tracks with small radii causes strong howling during operation, which has been bothering subway operating companies for many years. Therefore, revealing its causes and growth is important for the comfort and safety of subway operation. Current studies believe that the occurrence of rail corrugation is largely due to the resonant vibration of the wheel-rail system. However, little attention has been paid to the key causes of the track resonance and the practical prediction of the occurrence probability of rail corrugation on the certain track. This paper intends to solve these above issues. Firstly, the practical model of predicting the rail corrugation growth is proposed based on the wheel-rail coupling interaction, the key causes of corrugation are investigated, and the sensitivity analysis is carried out, while the corrugation superposition model is introduced to the analyze the corrugation evolution as well as to validate the corrugation growth from the aspect of material friction and wear. Secondly, the impact of the key causes on the initiation and development of the rail corrugation is investigated based on the cosimulation. Finally, case studies validate the proposed theory model and method. The results show that the practical prediction model for the rail corrugation growth proposed in this paper is able to estimate the occurrence possibility of rail corrugation on a specific track, and the superharmonic resonance of the track directly excited by passing vehicles eventually leads to rail corrugation. It is also found that shortwave corrugation develops more rapidly, and adjusting the support stiffness or sleeper spacing leads to fluctuations in the corrugation wavelength and its wear rate.
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