LAUSR

Abstract This paper presents an optimal solution for the alignment of horizontally curved track in a high-speed maglev line, in which the minimum length of the curved track is taken as a major objective function and the satisfaction of the minimum comfort level of passengers is considered as a boundary condition to constrain the selection of alignment parameters of the curved track. To verify the optimal solution provided by this study and assess the effects of viaduct subsystem and its interaction with train subsystem, the dynamic model of a coupled maglev train-curved viaduct system is numerically established, experimentally validated, and explicitly used to compute the responses of the train subsystem and viaduct subsystem. The computed results show that the comfort indexes computed from the dynamic model are comparable with those from the optimal solution. The parametric studies also show that with the increase of vehicle speed, the optimal radius of the circular track and the optimal length of the transitional track both increase but the cant and the cant deficiency remain constant.