It is the objective of this investigation to develop a systematic and automated procedure that can be used for modeling vehicle/turnout interactions. To this end, contact geometry analysis procedure is generalized for turnout simulations such that tongue rail profiles available from measurement and/or drawing can be automatically interpolated and used to produce multiple look-up contact tables. Having obtained multiple look-up contact tables, the wheelset trajectory coordinate is used to locate the nearest look-up contact tables to be interpolated for determining the location of contact point at every time-step in the dynamic analysis. The effects of the number of multiple contact tables on the accuracy of predicting the location of contact points are investigated. This leads to an important insight into the number of contact tables being generated. It is demonstrated with several numerical examples that a sufficient number of contact table needs to be employed for modeling a vehicle/turnout interaction around the region where the location of contact points is transferred to tongue rail. Furthermore, effects of using table-switching and table-interpolation approaches developed in this investigation on the accuracy of vehicle turnout simulation results are discussed. It is demonstrated that undesirable step-like changes in contact inevitable for the table-switching algorithm can be reduced using the table-interpolation algorithm.
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