Abstract Summary
The High-Speed Rail (HSR) is a complex system involving numerous technical aspects such as operations, infrastructure, and rolling stock. Among the most used infrastructures, bridges play a crucial role in allowing the railway to connect regions without interruption. Although the HSR's increased running speed reduces travel time and costs, safety and comfort should not be overlooked and must remain a primary goal. Because running trains cause large vibrations in substructures while also impacting train performance through the dynamic actions of track and bridge, understanding the train-track-bridge system has been a major focus of recent research. All of these are fundamental for the continuous development of the HSR, aiming at the preservation of the structural integrity of the bridge's operational safety. However, it is observed that the current models available in the literature are unable to introduce multiple interfaces of the train-bridge system at the same time, such as wheel-rail interaction, track-bridge interaction, and soil-structure interaction. Then, given the importance of high-speed rail for future transportation development, this work aims to close this gap by introducing a fully integrated three-dimensional train-bridge dynamic model, thereby opening a new door in the dynamic analysis of such systems. The model was developed through the interaction between the Matlab® and ANSYS® (2022) FEM platforms. The former allows for interaction between the bridge soil and the vehicle model, whereas the second takes advantage of existing modeling capabilities and solvers to consider any generic TBI and SSI scenario. A wheel-rail interaction element was created to simulate wheel-rail contact, to assess structure behavior at any level of complexity, including systems with significant nonlinearities. The normal contact was developed using a Hertzian formulation, whereas the tangential was created using various creep force theories.
