Continous rail absorber design using decay rate calculation in FEM

Abstract

In recent years, many countries have added railway noise to the issues covered by noise regulations. It is known that the rail is the dominant source of rolling noise at frequency range of 500Hz-2000Hz for the conventional speeds (<160km/h). One of the effective ways to reduce noise from railway track is using a rail vibration absorber. To study the acoustic performance of rail absorber, the decay rates of vibration have long been used by researcher. In this paper, A FE model of a periodic supported rail with infinite element in ABAQUS is developed to study the acoustic performance of the rail absorber. To compute the decay rates, acceleration responses along the rail transferred to MATLAB to obtain response levels in frequency domain and then by processing the response levels, the decay rates obtained for each1/3octav band. Continous rail absorber is represented by a steel layer and an elastomer layer. The decay rates for conventional rail and rail with one-side absorber and also, the rail with two side absorber are obtained and compared. Then, to improve the system of rail absorber, a steel plate with elastomer layer is added to bottom of the rail foot. The vertical decay rate results show that the decay rate of rail vibration along the track is significantly increased around the tuned frequency of the absorber and thus the rail vibration energy is substantially reduced in the corresponding frequency region and also effective in rail noise reduction.