Dynamic analyses of railway bridges with elastic bearings

Abstract

With an increasing trend in the development of new railway lines together with a greater focus on optimizing the life expectancy of infrastructure such as railway bridges, the importance of effectively monitoring and maintaining such structures becomes ever more crucial. Analysing models that accurately present the interaction between the traversing train and bridge, enables proper delegation of such maintenance.

The current thesis, studies the effect of elastic spring supports on the dynamic behaviour of railway bridges and the traversing trains. By developing a MATLAB code, which implements both elastic spring supports together with a proposed sprung mass model, a parametric study is conducted to gain an insight into this field of study.

As a conclusion, the parametric study indicates that a lower support stiffness and a faster train velocity are not necessarily related to a greater dynamic response of the bridge. Especially at a support stiffness at 1x106 kN/m, does the resonance condition bring a significant response. This is also the only case which contributes to an additional response on the traversing sprung masses. The calculation time for the proposed sprung mass model becomes nonviable at slower train velocities than 80 km/h with the defined CPU