Impact study of cable-stayed railway bridges with random rail irregularities

This paper describes a study of the vibration of cable-stayed bridges under moving railway trains. The moving train comprises a number of cars, each of which is modelled as a four-axle system possessing 10 degrees of freedom. The cable-stayed bridge is modelled as a planar system. As the rail irregularities are random in nature, sample profiles to model them are generated using a suitable power spectral density function of rail roughness. The behaviour of such a vehicle-bridge interaction problem is investigated using a typical cable-stayed bridge, The aspects studied include the effects of number of random samples, damping, class of railway track quality and initial motion of train vehicles. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.