KD-Railway 1.0 – A structural dynamics software for high-speed rail bridge based on open source Cast3m platform

Abstract

Creating calculation tools, algorithms, element models, and non-linear materials based on open sources has recently received the attention of scientists and companies. The paper generalizes one practical tool for analyzing the structural dynamics for the high-speed railway bridge based on Cast3M open-source. Compared with the classical approach with the analytical formulation, KD-Railway developed by the finite element method allows defining the structure with complex geometry and considering a different type of structure (truss, cable, hybrid composite) or the structure-soil interaction. Compared with the commercial software, KD-Railway meets two critical objectives for practical applications: minimizing the number of input parameters and fast calculation time due to the integration of sharing resource technology and parallel calculation of Cast3M. This paper clarifies the theoretical background and critical functionalities of KD-Railway. The validation process used 4 case studies covering the different moving load models, including the only moving load, a series of moving loads, and the real moving load model representing the conventional trains, applied for the simply-supported beam and continuous beam bridges. All the code of this first version of KD-Railway is available online.