Cross Wind Effects on Vehicle–Track Interactions: A Methodology for Dynamic Model Construction

Abstract

An efficient and accurate model for the dynamic assessment of vehicle-track behavior subjected to cross wind actions is developed in this paper, where the wind–vehicle–track interaction is regarded as a coupled vibration system. First, a vehicle–track interaction model is proposed by taking the hypotheses of wheel/rail rigid contact and displacement complementarity. Unlike explicit force-based methods, the vehicle-track systems are wholly coupled by interaction matrices and load vectors, which are computationally more efficient than most of the existing methods and fairly accurate in low frequency vibrations. Then, the fluctuating cross winds are simulated by the fast Fourier transform technique from spectral representations with the consideration of spatial correlation of multipoint wind time histories and vehicle movement. The unsteady cross wind forces are obtained by introducing weighting function. Finally, a modeling framework, with the coupled interactions between cross winds, vehicle, and the tracks included, is built effectively. Through the validated dynamic model, the cross wind effects on vehicle-track dynamic performance can be fully revealed. Besides, it is concluded that the dynamic performance of vehicle-track systems differs significantly in various excitation modes, i.e., average cross wind, fluctuating cross wind, and track irregularities.