Keywords: railway dynamics, multibody simulation, real tracks, prescribed speed, virtual homologation.

In railway dynamics, the simulation of railway vehicles in realistic operation conditions demands detailed models of the vehicle and of the track. In general, the motion of the vehicles along the dynamic analyses is ensured by initial or constant velocities, with no other methods being used to control the speed of the train. However, real railway tracks are characterized not only by curves with different radii and cant angles, but also by slopes that accelerate or slow down the vehicle. For these reasons, it is crucial to control the speed of the vehicle in order to ensure not only the realism of the simulation, but also to enable more accurate assessment of the safety and comfort of the passengers. In this paper, a light rail vehicle, used by the Portuguese rail company, is simulated on a mountainous railway track. The vehicle speed is controlled by drivers applied on the traction wheelsets. These drivers are implemented using the kinematic constraints described in this paper. The track geometry information, namely, the radius of the curves and their cant angles, is used here to set the vehicle speed as function of the track length. In particular, it is considered that the vehicle travels: at a nominal velocity in the tangent segments; at a velocity that exhibits zero non-compensated acceleration in curve segments; and, in the transition curves, the velocity of the vehicle varies. The methodologies developed in this work are suitable for the performance of realistic simulations with several applications, for example, a vehicle homologation studies.

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