Multidisciplinary Applications of Multibody Simulation to Railway Vehicle Engineering

Abstract

In this paper, some of the topics studied at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with respect to the multibody simulation of railway vehicles are briefly presented and discussed. They are all based on high level of multidisciplinarity in terms of itegration between different physical fields and, consequently, between heterogeneous computational approaches. The issues overviewed in the paper are: structural mechanics, covering the modeling of the elasticity of wheelsets, the acoustic analysis of flexible bodies and the inclusion of thermoelastic effects in multibody simulation; control, with focus on global vehicle dynamics control; and, finally, the multiphysical analysis of vehicles on the basis of an holistic approach.