Assessment of passenger comfort according to Eurocode in Dutch trains travelling over tied-arch railway bridges

Assessment of passenger comfort according to Eurocode in Dutch trains travelling over tied-arch railway bridges

Komen, B.

Bijlaard, F.S.K. (mentor)
Hoogenboom, P.C.J. (mentor)
Steenbergen, M.J.M.M. (mentor)
Van Almen, M. (mentor)

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Structural Engineering

2016-06-24

With increasing velocities of trains, passenger comfort starts to play a larger role in the design of railway bridges. There is little experience with the Eurocode passenger comfort criterion in the Netherlands. It is relevant for the industry to have a way to fulfil this criterion, also in an early stage of railway bridge design. A sufficiently simple method to give a proper first estimation would be really useful. According to the Eurocode, the comfort experienced by passengers in a train passing a railway bridge must be sufficient. The comfort level is expressed as a maximum vertical acceleration inside the coach. In this research, a method to compute this vertical acceleration is developed. The scope of the research is limited to steel tied-arch bridge with vertical hangers. To find the accelerations in trains passing over bridges a numerical vehicle-bridge interaction model was developed using Ansys, a FEM program. Several bridge models and vehicle models were made using mass, spring-dashpots, bar and beam elements. Simple versions of the Ansys model were compared with analytical-numerical solutions written in Matlab and with literature. The more complex Ansys models were compared with measurements in a Dutch train travelling over a bridge. Apart from looking at the vertical accelerations also frequencies of vibrations were considered. The used modelling technique proved to be feasible to execute with acceptable time to make and time to run. The results did compare well to analytical-numerical solutions for the simple models, but unfortunately the coach acceleration of the most complex bridge and vehicle model did not compare well with the performed measurements. Although the results are applicable specifically for the Dutch VIRM train and steel tied-arch bridges with vertical hangers, the modelling technique can easily be generalized to other train types and other bridge types.

Eurocode
passenger comfort
arch bridge
acceleration
ansys
train

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c7dbb6c9-3183-4b34-b786-c3b2dafc51c6

Student theses

master thesis

(c )2016 Komen, B. Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)