Dynamic Reliability Analysis of Running Safety and Stability of a High-Speed Maglev Train on a Guideway Bridge

The dynamic performance of high-speed maglev trains, a next-generation rapid transit system, has received continuous attention in recent years. In this study, a dynamic reliability analysis method for a high-speed maglev train–guideway coupled system was proposed. First, a refined model of the maglev vehicle–bridge interaction system was established, where the vehicle subsystem was simulated as a rigid body-spring-damper model with 101 degrees of freedom. The guideway subsystem was simulated as a finite element model, and these two subsystems were coupled as an entire system through a magnet–rail interaction model with a proportional-derivative (PD) controller. Second, a dimension-reduction method for the simulation of representative samples of track irregularities was developed, and thus the number of random variables in the system was reduced to four. Finally, an efficient method for the calculation of the dynamic reliability of a maglev train–guideway coupled system was proposed using the probability density evolution method-based equivalent extreme value principle. With numerical examples, the accuracy of the maglev train–guideway interaction model was verified by comparing it with field measurement data from the Shanghai high-speed maglev line. The accuracy of the proposed dynamic reliability analysis method was confirmed by comparing three types of results, that is, the mean value time-history curve, the probability density function, and the cumulative distribution function of extreme values, obtained by the Monte Carlo method. Finally, the dynamic reliability of the running safety and stability of the maglev vehicle at a speed of 430 km/h and the variation laws of the dynamic reliabilities with train speed were examined in detail.