Abstract
Resilient wheels are extensively used in urban rail transit, especially for tramway systems, owing to its advantages in noise reduction. A new type of resilient wheel for a metro is designed, and its characteristics of vibration and sound radiation, including the rolling noise of a resilient single wheel coupled with a track, are studied in this paper. A two-step research is presented. Firstly, laboratory experiments were conducted to obtain the vibration response of the designed resilient wheel under the radial excitation on its tread. Secondly, the rolling noise model of the resilient wheel coupled with a slab track used in a metro line is developed. The wheel model is based on the 3D finite element and boundary element methods and verified by using the experimental results obtained from the laboratory. The track vibration model is based on the wavenumber finite element method, and the track sound radiation is calculated by using an efficient frequency-domain Rayleigh method. The interaction of the resilient wheel and the slab track is analyzed considering the measured wheel/rail roughness of the metro. The contribution of the resilient wheel to the reduction of wheel/rail system noise is analyzed. The results show that the resilient wheel can effectively reduce the wheel/rail rolling noise by approximately 2 dB(A) to 3 dB(A), mainly because the radiated noise by the rail is reduced. In addition, the elastic modulus of the rubber has an important influence on the noise reduction of resilient wheels.
Highlights
The speed of metro trains is generally within 30 km/h to 120 km/h
Metro lines use slab track structures; vibration isolation track structures with low vertical stiffness are used in special sections
The noise of both the slab tracks and vibration isolation tracks is higher than that of ballasted tracks primarily because of the increase in rail noise owing to the use of lower fastener stiffness to isolate the wheel and rail vibrations [2, 3]
Summary
The speed of metro trains is generally within 30 km/h to 120 km/h. In this speed range, wheel/rail rolling noise is the primary noise source [1]. Based on the TWINS theory [15, 16], some scholars adopted simulation methods to study the vibration and noise reduction characteristics of resilient wheels [7, 17,18,19] and determined that the elastic modulus of rubber has an important effect on sound radiation of resilient wheels [7, 17]. Claus et al [21, 22] established the vertical dynamics model of the ICE railway car to study the possibility of resilient wheels reducing the low frequency interior noise. There were hardly any studies on the reduction of vibration and noise for the application of resilient wheels under the operating conditions of the metro. The wheel/rail rolling noise under the operating conditions of the metro line were considered
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