Overview and outlook on railway track stiffness measurement

Stiffness is one of the basic performance parameters for railway track. The efficient and accurate stiffness measurement has been considered as the foundation for further development of railway engineering, and therefore has great theoretical and practical significance. Based on a summary of the connotation and measurement of track stiffness, the state of the art of measurement methods for track stiffness was analyzed systematically. The standstill measurement of track stiffness can be performed with the traditional jack-loading method, impact hammer method, FWD （falling weight deflectometer） method, and track loading vehicle method. Although these methods can be adopted in stiffness measurement for a section of railway track, they are not desirable owning to small range and low efficiency. In the recent 20 years, researchers have proposed many methods like unbalancedloading laser displacement method, deflection basin deformation rate method, and eccentricity excitation method to continuously measure track stiffness; however, these methods have drawbacks like poor accuracy, low speed, and insufficient data analysis. In this work, the merits and demerits of these methods were summarized, and optimization suggestions were presented. Based on the wave transmission mechanism and principle of vibration energy harvesting, an overall conception on continuous measurement of stiffness and long-term stiffness monitoring for special sections was proposed.

Vibration transmissibility characteristics of smart spring vibration isolation system

The objective of this work was to study the vibration transmissibility characteristics of the undamped and damped smart spring systems. The frequency response characteristics of them were analyzed by using the equivalent linearization technique, and the possible types of the system motion were distinguished by using the starting and ending frequencies. The influences of system parameters on the vibration transmissibility characteristics were discussed. The following conclusions may be drawn from the analysis results. The undamped smart spring system may simultaneously have one starting frequency and one ending frequency or only have one starting frequency, and the damped system may simultaneously have two starting frequencies and one ending frequency. There is an optimal control parameter to make the peak value of the vibration transmissibility curve of the system be minimum. When the mass ratio is far away from the stiffness ratio, the vibration transmissibility is small. The effect of the damping ratio on the system vibration transmissibility is significant while the control parameter is less than its optimal value. But the influence of the relative damping ratio on the vibration transmissibility is small.

Dynamics Analysis of Active Variable Stiffness Vibration Isolator for Whole-Spacecraft Systems Based on Nonlinear Output Frequency Response Functions

In order to improve the harsh dynamic environment experienced by heavy rockets during different external excitations,this study presents a novel active variable stiffness vibration isolator(AVS-VI)used as the vibration isolation device to reduce excessive vibration of the whole-spacecraft isolation system.The AVS-VI is composed of horizontal stiffness spring,positive stiffness spring,parallelogram linkage mechanism,piezoelectric actuator,acceleration sensor,viscoelastic damping,and PID active controller.Based on the AVS-VI,the generalized vibration transmissibility determined by the nonlinear output frequency response functions and the energy absorption rate is applied to analyze the isolation performance of the whole-spacecraft system with AVS-VI.The AVS-VI can conduct adaptive vibration suppression with variable stiffness to the whole-spacecraft system,and the analysis results indicate that the AVS-VI is efTective in reducing the extravagant vibration of the whole-spacecraft system,where the vibration isolation is decreased up to above 65%under different acceleration excitations.Finally,different parameters of AVS-VI are considered to optimize the whole-spacecraft system based on the generalized vibration transmissibility and the energy absorption rate.

Elastically restrained Bernoulli-Euler beams applied to rotary machinery modelling

Facing the lateral vibration problem of a machine rotor as a beam on elastic supports in bending,the authors deal with the free vibration of elastically restrained Bernoulli-Euler beams carrying a finite number of concentrated elements along their length.Based on Rayleigh’s quotient,an iterative strategy is developed to find the approximated torsional stiffness coefficients,which allows the reconciliation between the theoretical model results and the experimental ones,obtained through impact tests.The mentioned algorithm treats the vibration of continuous beams under a determined set of boundary and continuity conditions, including different torsional stiffness coefficients and the effect of attached concentrated masses and rotational inertias, not only in the energetic terms of the Rayleigh’s quotient but also on the mode shapes,considering the shape functions defined in branches.Several loading cases are examined and examples are given to illustrate the validity of the model and accuracy of the obtained natural frequencies.