Symplectic random vibration analysis of a vehicle moving on an infinitely long periodic track

Based on the pseudo-excitation method (PEM), symplectic mathematical scheme and Schur decomposition, the random responses of coupled vehicle–track systems are analyzed. The vehicle is modeled as a spring–mass–damper system and the track is regarded as an infinitely long substructural chain consisting of three layers, i.e. the rails, sleepers and ballast. The vehicle and track are coupled via linear springs and the “moving-vehicle model” is adopted. The latter assumes that the vehicle moves along a static track for which the rail irregularity is further assumed to be a zero-mean valued stationary Gaussian random process. The problem is then solved efficiently as follows. Initially, PEM is used to transform the rail random excitations into deterministic harmonic excitations. The symplectic mathematical scheme is then applied to establish a low degree of freedom equation of motion with periodic coefficients. In turn these are transformed into a linear equation set whose upper triangular coefficient matrix is established using the Schur decomposition scheme. Finally, the frequency-dependent terms are separated from the load vector to avoid repeated computations for different frequencies associated with the pseudo-excitations. The proposed method is subsequently justified by comparison with a Monte-Carlo simulation; the fixed-vehicle model and the moving-vehicle model are compared and the influences of vehicle velocity and class of track on system responses are also discussed.