On effects of rail fastener failure on vehicle/track interactions

Rail support failure is inevitably subjected to track geometric deformations. Due to the randomness and evolvements of track irregularities, it is naturally a hard work to grasp the trajectories of dynamic responses of railway systems. This work studies the influence of rail fastener failure on dynamic behaviours of wheel/rail interactions and the railway tracks by jointly considering the effects of track random irregularities. The failure of rail fastener is simulated by setting the stiffness and damping of rail fasteners to be zeroes in the compiled vehicle-track coupled model. While track random irregularities will be transformed from the PSD functions using a developed probabilistic method. The novelty of this work lays on providing a method to completely reveal the possible responses of railway systems under jointly excitation of track random irregularities and rail support failure. The numerical results show that rail fastener failure has a great influence on both the wheel/rail interactions and the track vibrations if the number of rail fastener failure is over three. Besides, the full views of time-dependent amplitudes and probabilities of dynamic indices can be clearly presented against different failing status.