Development of a Simulation Tool for the Dynamic Analysis of Railway Vehicle - Track Interaction

The importance of modelling and simulation in the field of railway systems has greatly increased in the last decades. Various commercial simulation packages have been developed and are used to analyse the dynamic performance of railway systems. However, although sometimes the user needs to analyse various non-standard solutions, the possibility to integrate further modifications into the structure of such software is quite limited. Therefore, in some cases, in particular for specific modelling and analysis tasks, a feasible option is to develop flexible and robust simulation tools capable of using different configurations by modifying the models performing the dynamic analysis. The paper presents the mathematical modelling background and the conceptual design of a new of a new computational tool for the dynamic simulation of railway vehicle systems. The formulations employed in the proposed mathematical model are based on the multibody techniques. The developed model uses a combined frame of references that allows the use of independent coordinates without the possibility to have singularity configurations depending on the rotation sequence. The simulation tool is designed in a flexible form that enables the study of different configurations of the railway vehicles, as well as various track combinations.