Experimental Modeling of Railway Car Wheel-Forces During Turning

The interaction of the carried cargo and the carrying vehicle involves many aspects that can affect the transport safety from different perspectives. On the one side, the lateral inertial forces developed by sloshing cargo can affect the lateral stability of the vehicle, while at long term, such dynamic forces can affect the integrity of the infrastructure’s components, which can lead to transport accidents. In this paper, a tilt-table based testing rig is presented to simulate the dynamic response of the vehicle-cargo system to lateral accelerations associated to turning maneuvers. The conceptual design and final construction/instrumentation of the equipment are described. As a first use of the testing rig, a five-parameter two-degree of freedom simplified mechanical model for the liquid cargo – vehicle interaction is calibrated, yielding a high correlation with the experimental data (0.98). The improvement of the theoretical model is further discussed, as the model underestimates the loading cycles to the infrastructure, in 20%.