ABSTRACT
The common approach to railway vehicle dynamics is to assume rigid railway tracks. By the same token, the common approach to track analysis is to consider the vehicle as a moving load. Both of the approaches miss the coupled dynamics between the two systems. In this work the assumption of rigidity of the railway track is released and a finite element model of the complete track, i.e., rails, pads, sleepers, ballast and infrastructure, is used to represent the track geometry and flexibility. The dynamics of the railway vehicle is described using a multibody methodology. Due to the fact that not only the multibody and the finite element dynamic analysis use different integration algorithms but also because the vehicle and track models are simulated in different codes a co-simulation procedure is proposed and demonstrated to address the coupled dynamics of the system.
