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Impact of the Railway Vehicle Characteristics in Its Runnability in the Presence of Strong Winds

Pedro Montenegro^1,*, Raphael Heleno², Hermes Carvalho², Diogo Ribeiro³, Rui Calçada¹, Chris Baker⁴

1 CONSTRUCT-LESE, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias s/n, Porto, 4200-465, Portugal
2 Department of Structural Engineering, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Av. Pres. Antônio Carlos, 6627 - Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 31270-901, Brazil
3 CONSTRUCT-LESE, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, Rua Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida 431, Porto, 4249-015, Portugal
4 Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education, School of Engineering, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom

* Corresponding Author: Pedro Montenegro. Email:

The International Conference on Computational & Experimental Engineering and Sciences 2022, 24(1), 1-2. https://doi.org/10.32604/icces.2022.08678

Abstract

This work consists of evaluating the impact of the most relevant characteristics of railway vehicles, namely geometric, mechanical and aerodynamic properties, in their runnability in the presence of strong winds, more precisely in the risk of derailment. Such objective is achieved by performing several dynamic with a non-linear vehicle-structure interaction model developed by the authors [1,2] and used in other works in this field [3,4], which allows the evaluation of the wheel-rail contact forces and, consequently, the unloading index, as suggested by the European Norm EN 14067-6 [5]. The calculations are carried out for several scenarios characterized by different train and wind speeds. The wind is simulated with a stochastic model that allows the generation of turbulent wind time-histories based on power spectral density functions. The reference vehicle adopted in this work corresponds to the European InterCity Express 3 (ICE-3) train, whose original properties were parameterized to evaluate their influence in the vehicle’s stability. This parametric study focuses on the variation of several properties of the vehicle that may influence its dynamic behavior against crosswinds, namely the carbody mass, height of the gravity center, aerodynamic coefficients, and stiffness and damping of the suspensions. Apart from the suspensions’ properties, which prove to have a negligible influence in the vehicle’s stability, the remaining parameters have a significant impact in the running safety against crosswinds.

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Keywords

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