A Novel Snake-Like Model to Simulate Infinite Track for Vehicle–Track Coupling Vibration

Abstract

The dynamic interaction between the vehicle and track is one of the most critical issues for railways, as it is closely related to running safety. Previously, many vehicle–track coupling models have been developed to study the vibration response of the system. Even though the track is periodic and infinitely extended, only a finite length of the track has often been used in the simulation, so as to reduce the effort of computation. For some special issues, it is necessary to consider the influence of long-wavelength track irregularities on the vehicle responses, and the characteristic track length can reach up to the scale of kilometer. In practice, the computational effort of using a model to accommodate kilometer-long tracks is costly and even unacceptable. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel snake-like model inspired by the famous game Snake to simulate infinite tracks. In the snake-like model, each vehicle can travel on the track repeatedly via the transfer nodes installed at the end of the track. Two examples were presented to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the model proposed. The results showed that the accuracy of snake-like model is consistent with that of existing methods, but the computational effort has been reduced significantly.