A coupling method for wheel–rail longitudinal interaction

Abstract

Longitudinal wheel–rail interaction is often neglected in railway engineering research. In order to analyze the system dynamics with consideration of the braking force, a new longitudinal wheel–rail interaction model is proposed in this paper. Then, the reliability of the proposed model is verified by comparing the results obtained from the traditional vehicle-track coupled dynamic model. The calculated dynamic responses of the system with different time steps are compared to illustrate the stability of the proposed method. In the case study, the influence of the track irregularity on the dynamic response of the system is analyzed in detail, and it is found that the influence of the lateral track irregularity on the longitudinal dynamic response of the system is significant. In addition, the effect of the nonlinearity of ballasted bed longitudinal resistance on the longitudinal dynamic response, and it is found that the nonlinear characteristics of the ballast bed cannot be ignored.