• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.48-61
• /
• 2012

It is of great importance to assure the running safety, ride comfort and serviceability in designing the floating slab track for mitigation of train-induced vibration. In this paper, for this, analyzed are the system requirements for the running safety, ride comfort and serviceability, and then, the behavior of train and track at the floating slab track including the transition zone to the conventional concrete slab track according to several main design variables such as system natural frequency, arrangement of spring at transition, spacing of spring isolators, damping ratio and train speed, using the dynamic analysis technique considering the train-track interaction. The results of this study demonstrate that the discontinuity of the support stiffness at the transition results in a drastic increase of the dynamic response such as wheel-rail interaction force, rail bending stress and rail uplift force. Hence, it is efficient to decrease the spacing of springs or to increase the spring constants at the transition to obtain the running safety and serviceability. On the other hand, the vehicle body acceleration as a measure of ride comfort is little affected by the discontinuity of the stiffness at the transition, but by the system tuning frequency; thus, to obtain the ride comfort, it is of great significance to select the appropriate system tuning frequency. In addition, the effects of damping ratio, spacing of springs and train speed on the dynamic behavior of the system have been discussed.