Impact of maintenance conditions of vehicle components on the vehicle–track interaction loads

To improve the efficiency and competitiveness of railway transport, passenger and freight trains should travel faster and have increased payload, without losing the necessary levels of running safety and ride comfort, as well as assuring low aggressiveness on track and minimising the life cycle costs. Hence, the manufacturer’s challenge consists of improving the dynamic performance of the railway vehicles and reducing the loads on the track as well as on the rolling stock components. These objectives can be achieved through optimizing the design of the vehicle, while taking into consideration that the characteristics of the vehicle and of the track may change over time and space, and that they depend on the maintenance conditions of the vehicle and of the infrastructure. This work proposes a computational methodology to study how the varying vehicle component characteristics, on normal and degraded conditions, impact on the vehicle/track interaction loads and on the track damage. The purpose of this study is to trace a path towards a realistic definition of a load mission profile for the structural fatigue dimensioning of the vehicle components. The assessment criteria and the evaluated quantities are defined according to the EN14363 regulation.