An advanced vehicle-slab track interaction model considering rail random irregularities

This paper investigates a more advanced vertical vehicle-slab track interaction model (VTIM) by considering the discontinuity of track slabs, besides, it can be degenerated to the traditional two-dimensional model conveniently. Moreover, a cyclic calculation method (CCM) is further developed to solve infinite length calculations. On this basis, the proposed dynamic model and CCM are validated by comparing with the more comprehensive three-dimensional train-track model and fixed-point excitation method. Then, from aspects of probability statistics and frequency analysis, an illustrative example is particularly conducted to comprehensively characterize the dynamic responses of vehicle-slab track systems, in which the representative and realistic rail irregularity sets simulated by the track irregularity probabilistic model are used as the loading inputs. Results show that, with a low consumption of computational time and computer memory, the dynamic results derived from VTIM and CCM have a high accuracy, which indicates that the proposed dynamic model and calculation method can be efficiently and accurately used to analyze train-slab track interactions.