Laboratory Measurement of the Vibration Attenuation Performance of the Rail Fastening System
Invited paper
Pandrol France
Tuesday 2 june, 2015, 15:20 - 15:40
0.1 London (90)
Abstract:
Ground-borne vibration is the cause of complaints from people who live near
railway tracks. In response, rail fastening systems with improved
performance regarding vibration attenuation are sought. The vibration
attenuation performance of the rail fastening system can normally only be
measured after the track has been built, at which stage there is great
difficulty in making significant changes to the track structure.
Pandrol France has built a test rig that allows measurement of the vibration
attenuation provided by a given fastening system in advance of building the
track. The rig consists of an upper block, which can be chosen to replicate
the unsprung mass of the rolling stock, and a 6 tonne lower block that is
mounted on soft supports. The resilient element of the fastening system is
mounted between the blocks. A static load is applied to the resilient
element in order to represent the preload due to the rail clips and the
wheel load. A dynamic load of smaller amplitude is applied to the upper
block using an instrumented hammer, representing the excitation due to
wheel-rail roughness. An appropriate unsprung mass and preload level are
chosen by reference to the low-frequency dynamic stiffness of the fastening
system measured to the CEN 13146-9 standard and the use of a simple beam
finite element model of the track.
Force measurement made with the hammer and accelerations of the two blocks
allow transfer functions to be obtained between the dynamic force input, the
acceleration of the upper block and the acceleration of the lower block.
These transfer functions are used to calculate the attenuation provided by a
given fastening system, an insertion loss between two different fastening
systems, the dynamic stiffness and the damping loss factor of the resilient
element. The measurements can be made for different temperatures.