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Global vehicle dynamics event heads to Australia

Hundreds of vehicle dynamics experts from around the globe will converge on Rockhampton later this month, for the 25th International Symposium on Dynamics of Vehicles on Roads and Tracks.

CQUniversity will host the IAVSD’s biennial conference, which will see roughly 130 technical papers presented by experts travelling from Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas.

Symposium co-chairs Professor Colin Cole and Professor Maksym Spiryagin, who represent CQUniversity’s Centre for Railway Engineering, spoke with Rail Express ahead of the event, which takes place from August 14 to 18.

“We are increasingly dependent, in engineering, on the simulation of dynamics for the roadworthiness for the acceptance of vehicles and the investigation of accidents, and derailments,” Cole says.

“It takes good engineering and software to do these tasks. This [symposium] is a place where the problems, the next generation of modelling, and new developments will be presented.”

Prof. Cole says the forum will let the experts get down to the “nitty gritty issues” of how the science and software works in this space.

“What doesn’t work, what should be done, what shouldn’t be done,” he continues. “And really good debate, about wagon instability, numerical methods, and so on. It’s not just experts saying, ‘Oh, we did this, and it works’; there is a real delving into the science.”

Prof. Spiryagin describes Australia as a “world leader” in the use of simulation in vehicle dynamics research, noting the development of Australian Standard 7509, which details performance requirements for the dynamic behaviour of rollingstock on the Australian rail network.

“This standard assumes that we can use simulation tools as a validation for the new design of vehicles,” he notes.

Rockhampton was chosen by the IAVSD as the symposium’s location after a bid from CQUniversity. The IAVSD – International Association for Vehicle System Dynamics – was formed at the fifth IUTAM-VSD vehicle system dynamics symposium, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 1977.

Adding to the technical presentations from researchers from around the world, a State of the Art Paper will also be presented on each of the first four days of the symposium later this month.

As symposium hosts, the CQUniversity team has chosen to present a State of the Art Paper on the field of ‘Simulation and Implementation of Long Train Dynamics’, on day two of the event.

“[The increased use of simulation] is driven by the immense cost of in field tests,” Cole said.

“Crashing things is really expensive, so you can only test in fairly normal conditions. Simulations can take us further, and look at scenarios that are dangerous.”

“This conference also extends knowledge for road and rail vehicles with analysis relevant civil engineers because it consider the factors that affects vehicle dynamic performance from one hand and on the other hand it focuses on the influence of vehicle dynamics on pavement and track damage,” Spiryagin added.

“If we are going deeper, it includes multidisciplinary representation that allows addressing the operational processes of complex systems such as road and rail transportation.”

Find out more about the event, and how to attend, at http://www.iavsd2017.org