A mixed-frame-of-reference model for railway induced soil-structure vibration interaction

Abstract

When modelling the railway induced vibration in a building, three main aspects of the problem have to be considered: the vibration generation at the moving vehicle-track interaction points, the vibration propagation in the underlying infinite soil, and the vibration reception inside the building. This study proposes a computational modelling approach for predicting the full vibration propagation path from the train vehicles up to the building structure. The method includes a moving train model that is directly coupled to a stationary building structure, with interaction between them through the underlying soil using a single step solution procedure. A semi-analytical model is utilized to model the soil to which rigid objects and structures modelled by finite elements (FE) are coupled. The system is excited by a multi-body vehicle model passing over an irregular track. The proposed modelling approach uses the frequency-domain solution with some parts, such as the railway track, formulated in the moving frame of reference (FOR) and other parts, such as building structures, formulated in a fixed FOR. The coupling terms between the two FORs are found by utilizing an analytical formulation of receptance between the two FORs. It is shown that due to the coupling between the fixed and moving FORs, the previously uncoupled discrete frequencies become coupled through the other FOR as a result of the Doppler effect and wave scattering. Two solution procedures of the full system are pro-posed: partial coupling, where some secondary effects from reflected waves propagating through soil are disregarded, and full coupling, where the vehicle, track, soil and structure are modelled as a fully coupled system. Both proposed solution procedures offer a single-step approach for solving the whole system in the frequency-spatial domain. The application of the model is demonstrated and validated in two example cases: one analyzing a simple building structure near a railway track, using the partial coupling solution procedure, and another analyzing the behaviour of a vehicle model passing over a rigid block embedded inside the soil, using the full coupling solution procedure.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Evangelos Ntotsios: orcid.org/0000-0001-7382-0948

ORCID for David Thompson: orcid.org/0000-0002-7964-5906

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