Railway track dynamic modelling

The railway vehicles are an increasing mean of transportation due to, its reduced impact on environment and high level of comfort provided. These reasons have contributed to settle a positive perception of railway traffic into the European society. In this upward context, the railway industrial sector tackles some important challenges; maintaining low operational costs and controlling the nuisance by-products of trains operation, the most important being railway noise. Track dynamic plays a main role for both issues, since a significant part of the operational costs are associated with the track maintenance tasks and, the noise generated by the track can be dominant in many operational situations. This explains why prediction tools are highly valued by railway companies. The work presented in this licentiate thesis proposes methodologies for accurate and efficient modelling of railway track dynamics. Two core axes have led the development of this task, on one hand, the rail modelling and, on the other hand, the characterisation of the finite length nature of track supports. Firstly, concerning the rail modelling technique, it has evolved under two major premises. On one hand, regarding the frequency domain, it should describe high frequency behaviour of the rail. In order to accomplish with this first premise, a model based on Timoshenko beam theory is used, which can accurately account for the vertical rail behaviour up to 2500 Hz. On the other hand, with respect to the time domain, the response should be smooth and free of discontinuities. This last condition is fulfilled by implementation of the Timoshenko local deformation. Secondly, a model of support that considers its finite length nature is sought. For this purpose, a Timoshenko element over elastic foundation is formulated. Thus, the common model of support, which is based on a concentrated connection, is substituted by a distributed model of support. In this way, several enhancements are achieved; the temporal contact force response is smoothed and a more realistic shape is obtained, the amplitude of the displacement due to the parametric excitation is reduced and the magnitude associated to the ‘pin-pin’ frequency is not overestimated.QC 20170522