Abstract
The conventional seismic standard specifies that the seismic inertia force of trains is modeled as a uniformly-distributed load which has upper limit force of 30% of railway vehicle weight, However; this method has not been validated sufficiently. The object of this paper is to develop a reasonable seismic design method of railway structures which takes dynamic effect of railway vehicles into account. As the result of numerical simulations, it was found out that the structure response under earthquake motions varies in the range of -50~20% at its maximum due to the dynamic effect, depending on the characteristics of earthquakes, the degree of the plastic behavior of structures and the yield frequency, and that the structure response significantly increases due to concentrated load effect of the train if four wheel-axises sandwiching the coupler is placed on a structure at the time of the maximum acceleration of earthquake motion, although it is a rare case. In addition, as a simple method of modeling train weight in seismic design, an equivalent weight method which evaluates the dynamic effect of the railway vehicle using the equivalent weight ratio βeq was proposed. For heavy structures such as concrete structures, the equivalent weight ratio in the proposed method and that in the conventional method are the same. For light structures such as steel structures or composite structures, it changes depending on parameters such as the weight ratio of the structure / vehicles.
