29．Simulation of contact between running railway vehicles and railway structures during earthquakes

In order to carry out efficient simulations of running trains coming into contact with railway structures, a new algorithm was developed (Fig. 1). The new algorithm calculates contact between contact points placed on a multiple-body vehicle model and contact surfaces on 3D FEM-model railway structures.
Since this method significantly decreases the degrees of freedom in the analytical model, calculation times are significantly shorter than in the previous method where only FEM models were used. This means that practically, contact phenomena can be calculated in units of tens of seconds using this analytical method. The vehicle/railway structure contact model was also constructed using results from other detailed FEM analyses and actual large scale model experiments.
Integration of this new contact-algorithm into the dynamic interaction analysis program DIASTARS for Shinkansen trains and railway structures, has made it possible to quantitatively evaluate railway vehicle behavior and contact forces, taking into account contact with railway structures (Fig. 2 (a)). This method can also perform stable calculations in cases with non-linear contact force characteristics (Fig. 2 (b)).