Impact study of cable-stayed railway bridges with random rail irregularities

This paper describes a study of the vibration of cable-stayed bridges under moving railway trains. The moving train comprises a number of cars, each of which is modelled as a four-axle system possessing 10 degrees of freedom. The cable-stayed bridge is modelled as a planar system. As the rail irregularities are random in nature, sample profiles to model them are generated using a suitable power spectral density function of rail roughness. The behaviour of such a vehicle–bridge interaction problem is investigated using a typical cable-stayed bridge. The aspects studied include the effects of number of random samples, damping, class of railway track quality and initial motion of train vehicles.