Damage identification of vehicle-track coupling system from dynamic responses of moving vehicles

The structural responses are often used to identify the structural local damages. However, it is usually difficult to gain the responses of the track, as the sensors cannot be installed on the track directly. The vehicles running on a track excite track vibration and can also serve as response receivers because the vehicle dynamic response contains the vibration information of the track. A damage identification method using the vehicle responses and sensitivity analysis is proposed for the vehicle-track coupling system in this paper. Different from most damage identification methods of vehicle-track coupling system, which require the structural responses, only the vehicle responses are required in the proposed method. The local damages are identified by a sensitivity-based model updating process. In the vehicle-track coupling system, the track is modeled as a discrete point supported Euler-Bernoulli beam, and two vehicle models are proposed to investigate the accuracy and efficiency of damage identification. The measured track irregularity is considered in the calculation of vehicle dynamic responses. The measurement noises are also considered to study their effects to the damage identification results. The identified results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable to identify the local damages of the track accurately in different noise levels with only the vehicle responses.