SIMPACK Rail

The Market and Technology Leader in Railway System Dynamics

SIMPACK Rail is an add-on module which introduces a unique state-of-the-art CAE environment to the field of simulation technology for railway system dynamics.

SIMPACK Rail enables the simulation of any rail-based vehicle or mechanism – from tramcars to complete articulated high-speed trains, from roller coasters to material handling systems. Main manufacturers and operators around the world use SIMPACK Rail for their daily work. Virtually all modern rail vehicles in many countries have been designed with SIMPACK Rail.


SIMPACK Rail offers an easy-to-use user interface for creating any type of virtual railway model. Starting with automatically generated wheels and rails, a user may quickly build up a complete vehicle using model-in-model technique, full parameterisation and unique re-usable databases. Moreover, SIMPACK Rail is fully compatible with the other SIMPACK modules. Users can benefit from developments for other engineering disciplines.

SIMPACK Rail does not impose any fixed vehicle structure. A rail vehicle model in SIMPACK is just an arbitrary mechanism that has some wheels which may run on rails. Nevertheless there is a lot of specialised elements taylor-made for the modelling and simulation of rail-based vehicles.

SIMPACK's fast, accurate and reliable solver SODASRT 2.0 ensures short calculation times. Results you are used to from measurements and many more data that could never be measured in reality are available in SIMPACK's unique and user-friendly postprocessing environment.

 

Applications of SIMPACK Rail

  • Homologation, testing and acceptance
  • Curving behaviour, forces on rails and wheels
  • Passenger comfort
  • Derailment safety
  • Running stability, critical speed
  • Drivetrain
  • Fatigue and durability
  • Switches and crossings
  • Profile wear
  • Sidewind, gauging, earthquake, crash, pantograph, and more

 

Modelling Elements

  • Wheelsets, independent wheels, single wheels
  • Helical springs, airsprings, anti-roll bars, gearbox transmissions
  • Dampers with flexible mounting, anti-yaw dampers, friction dampers
  • Crash absorbers with hysteresis and elastic-plastic behaviour
  • Speed profile by force/torque control or rheonomically driven

 

Simulation Tasks

  • Fast, accurate and reliable time-domain integration with tolerance-controlled state-of-the-art integrator
  • Powerful linear calculations in frequency domain (eigenmodes, root loci, linear critical speed, interface to SIMPACK NVH)
  • Automatic series calculations with SIMPACK VTL or in batch mode

 

Postprocessing

  • Output of rail and wheel forces, creepages, contact patch size and shape, traction forces, wear number and much more (over 60 channels per wheel)
  • Frequency and statistical filters used in assessment standards (high-, low-, band-pass, percentiles, sliding mean/RMS, peak count, level crossing)
  • Passenger comfort filters (prEN 12299, Sperling, LD-value, ISO 2631)

 

Track

  • Track layout generator with parameterised input and file import
  • Measured, stochastic and analytical track irregularities
  • Flexible track foundations

 

Rail-Wheel Contact

  • Fast and accurate contact patch localisation based upon the actual profile geometry and material data
  • Unlimited number of contact patches per wheel
  • Normal forces based on Hertzian theory
  • Several creep force methods (Kalker's FASTSIM, Polách, user routines, and more)
  • Variable friction, wheel unroundness
  • Roller rigs
  • User-defined or automatic quasilinearisation of the contact geometry