Reducing wheel-rail interaction forces and roughness growth by application of rail Dampers

Abstract

High roughness growth occurs in situations with stiff vertical structural dynamics of the track. In particular the antiresonance above a sleeper at the pinned-pinned frequency has been identified as a wavelength fixing mechanism for short pitch corrugation. Rail damping devices (developed to reduce the noise from railway tracks) change the dynamic response of the rail, shifting the pinned-pinned frequency and smoothing the track receptance. Here, a simple time-stepping model is applied to calculate the interaction forces between wheel and rail for a track with and without rail dampers. The calculations show that rail dampers reduce dynamic interaction forces and shift the force spectrum to longer wavelengths. The interaction forces are used to predict the roughness growth after many wheel passages. Track without rail dampers is predicted to develop corrugation at the wavelength corresponding to the pinned-pinned frequency. With rail dampers the corrugation growth is reduced and shifted to a longer wavelength where its significance is diminished. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.