Impact of an Electric Locomotive on a Perfectly Smooth Railway Track in Terms of Rail Corrugation Formation

Purpose of the article is to demonstrate that a high-speed electric locomotive, driven by asynchronous motors in a hollow shaft arrangement and swing-out couplings, can generate corrugation conditions on the surface of new and smooth rails on straight and curved track. Most studies carried out in this area is usually concerned with the response of the power train to kinematic excitation from a track where corrugations are already present. The novelty of the look presented in the article is to establish the influence of the vehicle's driveline and the parameters of a perfectly smooth formation track on the mechanism of corrugation. A four-axle EU11 electric locomotive, produced in Poland in the late 1990s, has been selected for analysis. A complete electro-mechanical model of the locomotive was built using the Vi-Rail software and prepared for simulation on straight and curved track. A non-linear model of wheel-rail contact was included and the contact forces were determined for the locomotive model in motion with the active power system. Unbalanced inertia forces generated by the scattering of stiffness characteristics of the coupling links, have been included to the propulsion system as an additional source of dynamic excitations. The complexity of the obtained results was influenced by the fact that simulation studies were carried out in both the time and frequency domains. The results obtained in the time domain were used to calculate the vertical and torsional vibration frequencies with respect to the driving wheelsets. One of the most important results of the simulation studies carried out is the determination of the effect of locomotive acceleration on the frequency of resonant torsional vibrations of the wheelsets in straight and curved track traffic.