Virtual Prototyping: The Future Way of Designing Railway Vehicles

Abstract

Virtual prototyping represents an important way for cost and time efficient design of furture railway vehicles. SIMPACK as an universally applicaple simulation software for mechanical and mechatronic systems basing on a multibody system approach and providing the system engineer with powerful bi-directional interfaces to established Computer-Aided-Engineering software serves as a reliable and efficient base for this process. A comprehensive general wheel-rail module extends the software to the entire range of railway vehicles. Besides a short general description including the use of its interfaces, the emphazis is laid upon the contact modelling between wheel and rail for which a recently developed quasi-elastic contact model is applied. Two complex industrial simulation tasks from the field of advanced railway technology demonstrate the concurrent co-operation of all these features.