Vertical Interaction Between a Driving Wheelset and Track in the Presence of the Rolling Surfaces Harmonic Irregularities

Abstract The driving wheelset is used in railway traction (locomotives, electric trains, trams, etc.) to support part of the weight of the suspended mass and to drive and brake the vehicle. The dynamics of the driving wheelset/track system is a very important issue in the railway engineering, and this paper is focused on basic features of the frequency response functions which describe the dynamic behavior in the presence of the rolling surfaces harmonic irregularities. To this end, a simple model of the driving wheelset/track system with the range of application limited up to 6-700 Hz is adopted. The driving wheelset model consists of a free-free uniform Euler-Bernoulli beam with three attached rigid bodies, representing the axle, the two wheels and the gear; the distinct feature of this model is the inertial asymmetry. Two independent infinite uniform Euler-Bernoulli beams, each on its foundation including two elastic layers for rail pad and ballast and an intermediate inertial layer for sleepers represent the track model. For simplicity, the moving irregularity model is applied to simulate the interaction between wheels and rails. Numerical simulations show that the driving wheelset/track system has three resonance frequencies, all situated in the frequency range of the evanescent waves in rails. FRF of the driving wheelset/track system have been calculated for left and right wheel/rail pair. The influence of the asymmetric inertia of the driving wheelset and the out of phase between the rolling surface irregularities are evaluated in terms of frequency response functions of the wheel/rail contact force.