Seismic behaviour of high-speed maglev vehicle–guideway system under vertical earthquakes

In this paper, a computational model was constructed to investigate the vibrations of a maglev vehicle–guideway bridge system under vertical earthquake. The maglev vehicle was modelled as a multi-rigid body with 10 degrees of freedom, while the guideway bridge was simulated as a Bernoulli–Euler beam. The seismic acceleration, which was expressed as a non-stationary random process, was artificially synthesised based on the response spectrum. To simulate the interactions between a running maglev vehicle and the guideway bridge, an actively controlled magnetic suspension model was developed by employing a proportional derivative (PD) controller. A TR06 maglev train running on a simply supported box-section bridge was introduced as the example, and its dynamic behaviour was compared with those under non-seismic conditions. Results demonstrate that the vertical earthquake significantly amplifies the key dynamic characteristics of the system, including levitation gap fluctuations, car body and guideway vibrations. Furthermore, parametric studies were conducted to evaluate the influences of train speed, seismic intensity and seismic travelling wave velocity on the system’s vibration responses. The findings reveal that the seismic intensity was the dominant factor, and to ignore the effect of the seismic travelling wave velocity could lead to underestimating the dynamic responses of the coupled system when maglev vehicles move on bridges.