Application and Experimental Validation of a Multibody Model with Weakly Coupled Lateral and Vertical Dynamics to a Scaled Railway Vehicle

In this paper, a multibody dynamic model of a railway vehicle that assumes that vertical and lateral dynamics are weakly coupled, has been experimentally validated using an instrumented scaled vehicle running on a 5-inch-wide experimental track. The proposed linearised model treats the vertical and lateral dynamics of the multibody system almost independently, being coupled exclusively by the suspension forces. Several experiments have been carried out at the scaled railroad facilities at the University of Seville in order to test and validate the simulation model under different working conditions. The scaled vehicle used in the experiments is a bogie instrumented with various sensors that register the accelerations and angular velocities of the vehicle, its forward velocity, its position along the track, and the wheel–rail contact forces in the front wheelset. The obtained results demonstrate how the proposed computational model correctly reproduces the dynamics of the real mechanical system in an efficient computational manner.