A new dynamic vehicle/track interaction method with a finite element track model

With the increase in hardware capabilities, the simulation of dynamic vehicle/track interaction (VTI) with a flexible track model especially a finite element (FE) based track model is possible. This may be handled via a co-simulation between multibody system (MBS) software and FE software. Meanwhile the simulation time is still too long. This paper proposes a new method of VTI simulation with a FE based track model. The new method extracts the characteristic data (mass matrix, stiffness matrix, damping matrix of elements and the rail node coordinates) from the FE track model. An integrated FE solver in the MBS software VOCO is used to calculate the dynamic response of the track. The communication between vehicle dynamic and track dynamic is carried out within VOCO. Voided sleepers are common defaults in ballasted tracks. Modelling of voided sleepers introduce non-linearity in the VTI. The new method shows a good agreement with co-simulation in the case of voided sleepers, with the new approach being much faster.