Bond graph modeling of a railway truck on curved track

Rail vehicles become unstable beyond a critical speed because of speed dependant creep forces at the rail-wheel contact surface. There is a constant demand for improved rail vehicle model for design of high-speed vehicles, and track. Works available in the literature are based on models of trucks with various simplifying assumptions such as reduced degree of freedom, small displacements and without kinematic nonlinearities and inclination of the contact surface. In this paper an integrated bond graph model of a truck is developed for the first time without the aforementioned assumptions. It is found that truck dynamical behavior is significantly different from those found in the literature in some cases. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.