Vehicle-track interaction considering wheelset flexibility: Influence of the wheelset flexibility

In this paper, a vehicle-track dynamic interaction model considering wheelset flexibility is presented, in which the wheelset is simulated as flexible body by solid elements. In the terms of wheel-rail relationship, a method based on virtual degree of freedom method is proposed, and the wheel-rail coupling matrices are formed in the global coordinate system to avoid the complicated coordinate transformation. In order to verify the reliability of the proposed model, the dynamic responses of the vehicle-track model based on Timoshenko-beam and rigid-body wheelsets were compared by using pseudo excitation method (PEM), subspace iteration method (SIM) and time-domain integration method. It is found from the comparisons that the wheelset models simulated by Timoshenko-beam and rigid-body ignore the correlation between vertical and transverse dynamic performance of wheels, which will affect the calculation accuracy. Besides, it can be seen that the vehicle-track model applying Timoshenko-beam and rigid-body assumptions will underestimate the vertical acceleration of the wheelset in the high-frequency range.