Effect of assessment methods on the determination of the critical wind speeds of high-speed trains

Abstract

Critical wind speed can play an important guiding role in developing an initial train operation schedule and knowledge of it may prevent safety risks for a train. Hence, the efficient and accurate calculation of the critical wind speeds of trains is critical. This study addresses this topic and focuses on the influence of different methods on the calculation of the critical wind speed. The result reveals that the five-mass and three-mass methods can both be used to determine the critical wind speed of a train more quickly with acceptable accuracy, but these two methods overestimate the crosswind safety risk of the train. With the increase of the train's operating speed, the nonlinearity of the vehicle system is further enhanced. In particular, the influence of the rolling motion between the car body and the bogie is more prominent, and the results of the five-mass method and the multi-body simulation method tend to be the closest. Last but not least, the damping parameters and inertial forces ignored by the quasi-static method will effectively reduce the wind forces transmitted to the track, resulting in a smaller overturning coefficient and higher critical wind speed.