A QUASI-VEHICLE/BRIDGE INTERACTION MODEL FOR HIGH SPEED RAILWAYS

Vehicle response is served as a reference to evaluate riding comfort of passengers and running safety of moving carriages for high speed trains. In analyzing the vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) problems, two sets of coupled equations of motion for running vehicles and bridge need to be solved and the VBI system matrices must be updated and factorized at each time step in a time-history analysis. This paper proposed a quasi-VBI model to abridge the complicated computational process, in which the bridge is subjected to only moving static forces of the train loadings, and the moving vehicle over it is excited by the corresponding feedback bridge response. To examine the interacting degree of the vehicle with the bridge, a coupling evaluation index (CEI) is defined as a quantitative assessment of the VBI system. The numerical parametric studies reveal that (1) the mass ratio of vehicle to bridge is the most sensitive parameter affecting the bridge response; (2) increasing bridge damping can reduce the coupling degree of the VBI system at high speeds; (3) the present quasi-VBI model is an efficient and simple tool to predict the vehicle's response with enough accuracy based on engineering approximation.