Study of the Temperature Field of Cylinder Heated by Moving Heat Source Using a Numerical Method Based on a Small Computational Domain

The temperature field of the wheels of railway vehicles significantly changes with time and space under acting of some moving heat sources, such as the frictional heat generated at the wheel/rail contact region and frictional heat generated at the region of braking pad contacting. The reported studies show that the level of temperature and the temperature gradient have important effects on wheel functions, but the temperature field cannot be evaluated by the conventional analysis method due to the complexities of the heat source during the operation of wheels, so numerical analysis methods are strongly called for. Selection of the entire domain of wheel as the computational domain for numerical analysis reduces the feasibility of the numerical method, because in such case a grid system with small grid numbers is required. Small grid numbers results in a large control volume, which decreases the accuracy of numerical method. To increase the numerical accuracy, in this paper we propose a numerical method using small domain to explore the temperature field of a cylinder heated by a moving heat source on the its side surface. The results show that the numerical method using a small domain not only reduces the computational time but also obtains the temperature field of a cylinder heated by moving heat source with high accuracy.