The response of a layered half-space to traffic loads moving along its surface

Summary The dynamic behaviour of a railway system is influenced by the interaction of its three subsystems: the vehicles, the rail construction itself and the subsoil. In this paper, the subsoil is considered as a linear-elastic layered half-space. Integral transformations are used for the analysis of this system: Fourier transformation for the time/frequency domain and for the space/wavenumber domains with respect to the horizontal coordinates. One arrives at an ordinary differential equation for the vertical direction, by which different layers or continuously changing elastic properties can be taken into account in an efficient manner. The efficiency of the transformation technique depends substantially on the effort necessary for the inverse transformation. A substantial reduction of data can be achieved in an error-controlled procedure if a wavelet transformation is applied as an additional transformation. The calculations are illustrated by solutions of several examples of moving time-dependent loads, particularly of a train model with four vehicles idealized by moving forces, time depending as if they were passing a rigid surface with a given roughness. Received 23 December 1997; accepted for publication 22 July 1998