Improving the validation of a railway vehicle model in the virtual certification process

Sammanfattning: Before vehicles can be placed in service it has to complete an authorisation process. At the moment,this process is largely depended on tests. This is, however, an expensive and long process. With new technologies and improved simulations this process can be shortened and the costs can be lowered. The validation of a vehicle model, however, is often limited by the available data. Often the measured rail profiles are not available and thus a new UIC60 profile is used for the simulations. The railway track often has been used and showssigns of wear and damages, therefore research has been done to investigate the influence of the rail profiles on the validation of a railway vehicle model. The current methods of validation in the European norm are used to compare simulated values with forces and accelerations available from vehicle measurements. In the first step,25 track sections with different curve radii have beensimulated with a measured rail profile every 100 meters. In the next step, the same sections have been simulated by using the standard UIC60 rail profile. The results show that the use of measured rail profiles does have a positive influence on the outcome of simulation. In the final step, one single narrow curve has been simulated to show the effect of standard and worn rail profiles. Four different wear stages of the rail profile are simulated and compared to the available vehicle measurements available. These simulations show that the use of a medium worn rail profile gives the most accurate value.