ABSTRACT

This chapter presents examples and indicates open problems for two different kinds of vehicle guideway interaction, their modelling and their computer simulation. The vehicle guideway interaction is frequently neglected for running stability investigations of railway vehicles. This is allowed, since on a normal track the elastic deformation of the track is small and it hardly influences the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle with respect to the running stability. However, if other phenomena have to be investigated, such as the noise response of the car body caused through the track irregularities or through eccentric rotating wheelsets, the modelling is inadequate without considering the interaction of vehicle and track. The guideway is composed of a series of identical, elastic guideway parts which are not coupled to each other. Each guideway part consists of a sequence of coupled homogeneous Bernoulli-Euler beam-elements. The interaction between guideway and vehicle model is provided a sequence of concentrated coupling forces moving with constant velocity.