The field of railway vehicle dynamics deals with low frequency forces and

vibrations in terms of derailment safety, track fatigue forces, running stability,

and ride quality. The principal source of excitation is the wheel/rail interface,
particularly track alignment irregularities. (Two-level numerical optimization of
ride comfort in railway vehicles)
The present railway operators are facing intense pressure due to competition
from the air and road transport industries. In order for them to operate more
efficiently and effectively, they are investigating ways to reduce the travelling
time, increase the number of passengers and reduce operating costs. The trend
of faster and lighter vehicles are ways in which these objectives can be met.
Therefore trains of the future will be designed with lighter bodies and bogies to
enable them to operate at a much higher speed. At this moment, the highest
speed for an in-service operation train is 300 km/h, which is achieved by TGV in
France and Shinkansen in Japan, but as the speed of the train is increased above
this level it will lead to more high-frequency vibrations which will certainly affect
the ride quality and generate unacceptable levels of internal noise.
Present vehicles are designed to have the body much heavier than the bogie,
which prevents the bogie excitation frequencies from coinciding with the body
excitation frequencies. However with lighter vehicles the flexible frequencies of
the body will definitely coincide with the bogie excitation frequency, and this will
cause an increase in the ride accelerations, and result in the reduction in the ride
comfort (ride quality). An important application of active control is therefore for
flexible railway vehicle bodies, not only to provide a better ride quality in general,
but also to enable lighter bodies with lower fexibility frequencies to be taken
advantage of.( Active suspension control of flexible-bodied railway vehicles)
Rail transportation remains the most cost effective method for moving
passengers or freight between two locations connected by land. This is due to the
low energy loss of metal on metal contact between wheels and rail.
Nowadays, three-dimensional design softwares, finite element method (FEM)
analysis tools, and aluminium alloy profiled materials are widely used in railway
industry, which makes light structures no longer a mission impossible [1].
Demands by transportation service providers to maximize usage of the limited
axle loads also compel the railway industry to adopt the light structure design.
But light weight design, while satisfying the requirements of strength and
crashworthiness, is achieved usually at a cost of significant decrease in structural
stiffness and consequently the decrease of bending frequencies. Thereby, the
traditional rigid-body models are no longer suitable to predict the ride
performances accurately
When dealing with high speed trains, the forces induced by the track
unevenness, although filtered by the primary and secondary suspension systems,
can lead to a significant excitation not only of the carbody motion as a rigid body,
but also of its flexible vibration modes. This generally results in considerable
vibrations inside the carbody, thus affecting passengers comfort.
Proper modelling of the carbody as a flexible body is essential in the numerical
simulation of the dynamic behaviour of high-speed rail vehicles, especially for
ride comfort analysis [2,3,59]. The most effective and easiest way to introduce
structural flexibility in a vehicle model consists in modal superposition approach,

because it allows the dynamic behaviour of a flexible body to be reproduced, just

considering few modes in the frequency-range of interest.