Adaptive FEA of wave propagation induced by high-speed trains

The analysis of wave propagation in a solid under moving dynamic loads is a topic of great interest in railway engineering. On actual lines, high-level vibrations identified to be similar to supersonic booms in fluid dynamics has been observed when trains run at speeds close to or exceeding the surface wave velocities in the surrounding ground. The objective of the present paper is devoted to develop effective numerical procedures for solving problems associated with wave propagation in the track–ground system. Our approach is based on the discontinuous Galerkin space–time method, by which the finite element discretization is applied not only in space but also in time. For adaptivity, the Zienkiewicz–Zhu error estimate as well as a very simple refinement indicator based on the gradients of effective stresses (or other variables of interest) are used.