On the nonlinear dynamics of a high-speed railway vehicle with nonsmooth elements

Abstract

• A comprehensive lateral mathematical model of a high-speed railway vehicle with nonsmooth elements is built. • Numerical methods are presented to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of high-speed railway vehicles. • Nonlinear dynamics of a Chinese high-speed railway vehicle is investigated. • Influences of primary system parameters on the nonlinear dynamics of a Chinese high-speed railway vehicle are illustrated. A comprehensive lateral mathematical model of a high-speed railway vehicle with 17 degrees of freedom is built to study its nonlinear dynamics on a straight line. The hunting stability is explored by using eigenvalue analysis , bifurcation diagrams and the first Lyapunov coefficient. Due to the non-smoothness in the wheel/rail contact table and the secondary suspension elements such as anti-yaw dampers, bump stops , etc., an event-driven strategy is applied in the integration process of the ODEs . As an example, the nonlinear dynamics of a Chinese Railway High-speed (CRH) vehicle (named CRH2) is investigated. The result shows that the stable equilibrium of the high-speed railway vehicle loses its stability through a supercritical Hopf bifurcation with the increase of the forward speed, and the stable periodic solution loses its stability through a grazing bifurcation with the decrease of the forward speed. The influence of primary system parameters on the hunting stability of the high-speed railway vehicle is also investigated.