This article describes an investigation on the relative motion between wheel-set and rails. Through the search of an equilibrium configuration, the positions of contact points between rails and wheels are first located. The detection methods allow also the definition of the normal unit vectors to rail and wheel at contact points. To reduce computing time, the results are stored in a lookup table accessed during the dynamic analyses of wheel-sets, bogies, or trains. The use of lookup table considerably speeds up contact detection when numerically integrating with respect to time.
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