Performance of railway track system under harmonic loading by finite element method

Abstract

The performance of railway track under dynamic loading depends on many parameters such as type of sleepers, ballast, soil - structure interaction and the relation of contact forces between the track and railway. The rail track classified as low and high speeds, where speed is a very important factor in design. Many theoretical models were derived and some developed for dynamic analysis of railway track system with assumptions that simplified or matched actually the real behavior especially the support of sleepers as linear or nonlinear and the contact between railway and track. In the present paper, a Finite Elements Approach is one of the numerical analysis by ANSYS software that adopted here to study the performance of harmonic analysis of railway track system. Harmonic ranges were applied with constant applied loading based on the European code for the steel rail.