Effects of uncertain suspension parameters on dynamic responses of the railway vehicle system

Abstract

Due to the manufacture error, design tolerance and time-varying factors, the suspension parameters of railway vehicles are always uncertain. This paper investigates the stochastic vibration of the railway vehicle system with uncertain suspension parameters. The energy method and Hamilton’s principle are adopted to derive the governing equations of the deterministic railway vehicle system, in which the rigid and flexible modes of the railway car body can be considered. Based on the deterministic model, the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) method is further employed to perform the uncertain analysis of the railway vehicle system. The global sensitivity analysis of the stochastic response of the railway vehicle with uncertain parameters is further carried out based on the PCE method and Sobol indices. The accuracy of the proposed method is validated by comparing the obtained random results with those from the published literature and satisfactory agreements can be observed between them. Furthermore, the effects of uncertain suspension parameters on the stochastic vibration characteristics of the railway vehicle system are discussed, which can be used as the reference for the dynamic design of the railway vehicle system. The numerical results show that the computational efficiency of the PCE method is significantly improved compared with the Monte Carlo method.