Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF RAILWAYS TRACKS USING THE SPECTRAL ELEMENT METHOD: A LATTICE-STRUCTURE-BASED APPROACH
Submission Author:
Pedro Augusto Beck , MS
Co-Authors:
Pedro Augusto Beck, Geder Gabriel Louback Cunha , Douglas Bueno, Rodrigo Borges Santos
Presenter: Geder Gabriel Louback Cunha
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0157
Abstract
Rail transport is an excellent option to large scale transportation because it usually is capable of transporting very high loads, mainly raw materials and passengers. These vehicles commonly are very safe, non-polluting and with cheap fuel when compared to other types of transportation. In the following years an important expansion of the railway track is expected in Brazil, and it is necessary to improve the national infrastructure and create an interesting environment to develop new technologies in relation to the rail transport. In addition, this context provides new challenges and opportunities to the classical railway engineering, and requires a better understanding of the railway track dynamics for establishing different engineering applications. New technologies and methods for damage detection are required to establish efficiency process of structural health monitoring (SHM) focused on this type of structure. A SHM process focused on damage detection along the railway track usually is a challenge task due to the length of this type of structure. This characteristic creates additional difficulties for employing classical approaches, such as visual inspections, liquid penetrant inspections, and other ones from the non-destructive testing category. In this sense, an important step for introducing a SHM-process is to create a representative dynamic model in the frequency domain, with accuracy for high frequencies, mainly for the model-based SHM methodologies. In this context, the main goal of this work is to introduce a dynamic model for railway tracks based on the Spectral Element Method. The Lattice Structures approach is employed to obtain the frequency response functions (FRF). This type of approach involves a relatively low computational cost once its solution is closer to the analytical solution. The dynamic effects of the rail, rail-pads, sleeper, the ballast stiffness and damping are included to evaluate the influence of each one on the system response. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach to describe the dynamics of railway tracks.
Keywords
Rail transport, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), Dynamic model, spectral element method, Frequency response functions (FRFs), Lattice Structures
