Rail Analyzer: 3D Model-Based Railway Simulation Software for Wheel-Rail Interaction

Railway vehicles form a major form of transportation in India and their operations have been in place for more than a century. In the recent past, emphasis has been given to improve the safety and the speed of the railway vehicles. This calls for realistic modelling and analysis of railway vehicles, for which many software applications exist. However, these are all primarily developed outside India and hence a need for an indigenous analysis software exists. In this paper, an attempt to develop an in-house railway dynamics analysis software in the form of RailAnalyzer has been reported. In the current scenario, kinematic and dynamic analyses of an isolated wheelset have been implemented. It allows the user to choose dicone wheelset on tangent knife-edge, and cylindrical rails, and also the actual wheel profile of S1002 and rail profile of UIC60. The analyses results can be seen in the form of animation of 3D model of the wheelset motion on the rails and also has options to view graph plots. The future versions envisage to model the other systems such has bogie, carbody and full train.