Effect of tangent track buckle on vehicle derailment

In order to investigate the effect of a tangent track buckle on the dynamic derailment of a railway vehicle, a coupled vehicle/track dynamics model is developed, in which the vehicle is modeled as a 35 D.O.F. multibody system and the track is modeled as a 3-layer discrete elastic support model. Rails are assumed to be Timoshenko beams supported by discrete sleepers, and the effects of vertical and lateral motions and rolling of the rail on the wheel/rail creepages are taken into account. The sleepers are treated as Euler beams on elastic foundation for the vertical vibration, while as lumped masses in the lateral direction. A moving sleeper support model is developed to simulate the effect of the periodical discrete sleepers on the vehicle/track interaction. The vehicle and the track are coupled by wheel/rail contacts whereas the normal forces and the creep forces are calculated using the Hertzian contact theory and the nonlinear creep theory by Shen et al., respectively. The equations of motion of the coupled vehicle/track system are solved by means of an explicit integration method. A tangent track buckle is simulated with a cosine function, which describes the misalignment of the track with different lengths due to its buckling. In the analysis the effects of the buckle wavelength and amplitude and of the vehicle speed on the dynamic behavior of the coupled vehicle/track system are considered. The present paper analyzes in detail the conventional derailment coefficients which include the ratio of the wheel/rail lateral force to the vertical force, the wheel load reduction, and the new criteria indicating the wheel/rail contact point traces and the wheel rise with respect to the rail. These criteria are simultaneously used to evaluate the risk of derailment of the whole vehicle. The numerical results obtained indicate that the track misalignment caused by the buckle and the vehicle speed have a great influence on the whole vehicle running safety when the vehicle passes through the buckled tangent track.