Dynamic Analysis of Rail-Vehicle Systems Using Dynalist II

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the DYNALIST (Dynamics of Articulated Linear Systems) computer program and demonstrate its application to rail-vehicle systems. The program is available through the U. S. Department of Transportation, Transportation Systems Center, and offers general modeling and computational tools for linear analysis in the frequency domain based on modal superposition. The paper describes the lateral dynamic analysis of a passenger-type vehicle including calculations for sinusoidal, periodic and stationary random rail irregularities. A transient response capability is also demonstrated. Approximate results based on modal truncation are compared to exact solutions.