Title: Recent advances in the fundamental understanding of railway vehicle dynamics

Authors: Hans True

Addresses: Technical University of Denmark, Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Richard Petersens Plads 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

Abstract: The topic of this article is the calculation of the critical speed for railway vehicles. It is emphasised that it is misleading to formulate the mathematical problem as a stability problem. It must correctly be formulated as a problem of existence of coexisting solutions to the full non-linear dynamical problem. The lowest speed at which there exist more solutions is the true critical speed, which corresponds well with the measured critical speed in road tests. A couple of examples show applications of the method to various dynamical models of railway vehicles. Freight wagons are treated in the end of the article because the dry friction damping with stick-slip and end stops in the suspensions demand the use of the newest numerical solvers and great care in their application to the dynamical problem in order to obtain reliable results.

Keywords: nonlinear dynamics; railway vehicles; critical speed; vehicle dynamics; dynamic modelling; freight wagons; dry friction damping; stick-slip; end stops; railway vehicle suspensions; railway vehicle design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2006.008481

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2006 Vol.40 No.1/2/3, pp.251 - 264

Published online: 22 Dec 2005 *

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