A comparison between the use of straight and curved beam elements for modelling curved railway tracks

Description

A major environmental concern related to railway traffic is vibration. A lot of research has been carried out to understand vibration of straight tracks, with less attention been paid to curved tracks. Modelling the dynamic behaviour of a curved railway track is important to understand the physics of generation and propagation of vibration from trains at non-straight sections of tracks. Modelling is also important to assess the current and any alternative track designs from an environmental point of view. In this paper a curved track is modelled and the effect of curvature is investigated. Two models have been developed and their results have been compared. In the first, the curved track is modelled using straight beam elements. In the second curved beam elements are used. For both, the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory has been adopted to describe their bending behaviour. The elements have 12 degrees of freedom accounting for

Period	10 Sep 2013
Held at	11th International Conference on Vibration Problems
Event type	Conference
Conference number	11
Location	Lisbon, Portugal
Degree of Recognition	International