Determination of the Effect of Sloshing on the Railcar-Track Dynamic Behavior

This paper presents the study of the impact caused by a liquid cargo on a railway infrastructure. The dynamic behavior of a tank car corresponds to a multibody dynamic system with several degrees of freedom. This study's data were obtained from a scale experimental fixture consisting of a track and a railcar with a tank. The track was instrumented with strain gauges and the railcar with accelerometers. The data showed non-periodic and periodic terms; therefore, the results were analyzed with the Empirical Mode Decomposition method (EMD). It was found that the EMD identified the signal components that were related to the sloshing. These components represent the mode shapes of the original signal. The location of the sloshing in the track was found applying spectrograms to the accelerometer data. This paper's experimental outputs suggest that the sloshing effect is detectable at the track and in the vehicle dynamics.