Dynamic analysis of railway bridges supported by a Winkler foundation under uniform partially distributed moving railway vehicles

Abstract

Transport structure such as railway bridges (plates), are subjected to moving railway vehicles (loads) which vary in both space and time. This branch of transport has experienced great advances, characterised by increasing high speed and weights of railway vehicles. Structures and media on which the railway vehicles move have, therefore, been subjected to vibration and dynamic stress more than ever before. The motivation for this paper is the observation that most of the works available in the literature are concerned with plates for which the effects of both rotatory inertia and shear deformation are neglected. Also the plates are assumed not resting on any foundation. In this paper, the dynamic response of railway track, modelled as an elastic rectangular plate, continuously supported by an elastic foundation and traversed by moving railway vehicle is investigated. Finite difference method is used to transform the set of coupled partial differential equations to a set of algebraic equations. The desired solutions are obtained with the aid of computer programs developed in conjunction with MATLAB. This shows that the elastic foundation, rotatory inertia and shear deformation have significant effect on the dynamic response of the railway bridge, to the moving railway vehicle (modelled as partially distributed moving load). In particular, it is observed that the deflection of the railway bridge decreases as the foundation moduli increase. © 2014 WIT Press.