Multibody simulation of rail vehicle running considering track flexibility

Abstract

Computer simulations are nowadays widely used tools for investigation of interaction of a rail vehicle and a track. They enable to study many important aspects influencing running properties of a rail vehicle under various operation conditions without having a real vehicle as well as to detect and predict mechanisms of adverse effects incident during a rail vehicle running on a track. A rail vehicle is most often evaluated in terms of running safety and passenger ride comfort. For achieving adequate results from computer simulation there is necessary to create such a model of a rail vehicle and a track, which will represent a real object of the investigation. While in most cases of multibody simulations a model of a rail vehicle is build up and described relatively in detail, a model of a track is not always prescribed including stiffness and damping properties. Therefore the content of this article is focused on evaluation of the fact, how the flexibility of a track influences selected outputs quantities. For assessment of results values of accelerations were chosen.