Railway vehicle and bridge interaction: some approaches and applications

Abstract

This paper on railway vehicle and bridge interactions is from the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer System Design and Operation in Railways and Other Transit Systems, held in Beijing, China, in 2010. The authors use a computer-aided engineering (CAE) approach to analyze the dynamics of a coupled model of a flexible railway bridge and a train. They use Universal Mechanism (UM) software. The dynamics of flexible body railway bridges are simulated using data imported from finite element analysis (FEA) software. The authors present a comparison of flexible deflections and stresses for the full and reduced FE-models for static and moving loads. The simulation results for a high-speed train on a bridge that is modeled as a reduced FE-model with 50, 100 and 200 flexible modes, as well as comparison of simulation results for separate and coupled approaches to vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI), are shown. The simulation results for the moving load tests showed a good agreement between full and reduced FE-models, proving the practical use of reduced FE-models of bridges for the simulation of vehicle-bridge interaction. The considered model of the high-speed and heavy-haul trains on the bridge did not show any significant difference between the separate and coupled approaches for simulating a vehicle-bridge interaction.