Vtech CMCC provides various software products for the numerical simulation of rolling contact situations. The flagship product is the CONTACT software, which is considered the golden standard for wheel/rail contact evaluation. Other products are USETAB, FASTSIM and FASTSIM2.

The history of CONTACT goes back to the 1970’s and 80’s, to the groundbreaking works of professor Kalker. The original software was acquired by VORtech in the year 2000, at Kalker’s retirement from Delft University of Technology. VORtech extended the program with respect to the speed of computations and the physics involved, including the effects of interfacial layers and conformal contact situations. The software was transferred to Vtech CMCC in 2020. We developed the automated analysis of geometry from given profiles, that greatly simplifies the running of CONTACT for generic wheel/rail contact situations, and the integration in the multibody approach.

• The stand-alone CONTACT program works on the basis of a textual input-file. A basic GUI is provided for operating the program. The results are inspected mostly in MATLAB^®.
• The CONTACT library version for Matlab, Fortran, C and Python provides the same algorithms in a way accessible to other softwares. The functionality is captured in convenient wrapper routines, allowing for flexible automation of advanced calculations.
• Add-ons to GENSYS, NUCARS^®, Simpack Rail, Universal Mechanism and Vampire Pro provide extension modules that are fully integrated, allowing to incorporate detailed wheel/rail contact analysis in various vehicle dynamics scenarios.