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Wind and Structures
  Volume 33, Number 1, July 2021 , pages 1-11
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12989/was.2021.33.1.001
 


Overturning assessment of railway vehicles under cross winds
Zhiyong Yao and Nan Zhang

 
Abstract
    The overturning issues in a strong wind are extremely critical to the railway vehicles, which have attracted a great deal of attention over the years. To address such problems, this paper introduces a dynamic reliability approach to evaluate the overturning risk of vehicles in crosswinds. Starting from the aerodynamic model, a novel prediction formula of unsteady crosswind forces with a consideration of the complete turbulent field effect is derived. Using the pseudo-excitation method (PEM), the power spectrum of vehicle responses is then calculated by the established vehicle model, and finally the corresponding results are used to assess the probabilistic overturning of vehicles in terms of the dynamic reliability analysis. It is found from the calculations that the time-dependent failure probability curves are related to the vehicle speed, wind speed, and crosswind direction, and the probabilistic characteristic wind curves (PCWCs) at different failure probabilities are more useful and reasonable for evaluating the overturning risk in comparison with the traditional characteristic wind curves (CWCs) in previous investigations. Furthermore, the probabilistic characteristic wind surface (PCWS) that considers the effect of crosswind direction, is developed, and it reveals that the vehicle is most vulnerable at a condition of perpendicular crosswind direction.
 
Key Words
    cross wind; railway vehicles; overturning risk; failure probability; PCWCs
 
Address
Zhiyong Yao:School of Civil Engineering, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, PR China/ School of Civil Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, PR China

Nan Zhang:School of Civil Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, PR China/ Beijing Key Laboratory of Structural Wind Engineering and Urban Wind Environment, Beijing 100044, PR China
 

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