The Simulation Research Of Roller Coaster Based On Virtual Prototyping

With the development of economy and human being society, roller coasters have won people's affection due to its unique charm. With a succession of dramatic rise in the level of entertainment, the safety of the roller coaster has obtained more and more attention. Our country has strict rules on their running speed, acceleration and so on during the operation process so as to protect the personal safety of tourists. According to the latest national standards, the manual calculation of the design and functional parameters for checking roller coaster has been unable to meet the standards. Therefore, the dynamic simulation software ADAMS which is widely used in the engineering field has also been applied to the roller coaster simulation study.However, in the current research on simulation study, few of them focus on the completeness and accuracy of roller coaster trajectory modeling and the three-dimensional design of trajectories determine the kinetics and dynamic features during the operation of roller coasters. Therefore, it is necessary to find a complete and accurate modeling method for the trajectory of roller coaster.In this paper, the example comes from a ring-style roller coaster which is produced by a domestic company. With the application of ADAMS modeling techniques, combined with three-dimensional solid design software Pro/E and the finite element analysis software ANSYS, the construction modeling approach of the trajectories of roller coaster and the virtual prototype models of cars are studied, according to the simulation of actual operation condition of roller coaster, and the velocity curve, acceleration curve and constraint forces and other relevant data are obtained, especially the key issues in the modeling process are discussed: the effect of the number of spline points and the step length on the simulation results, etc.After the result of the simulation on the trajectories made by different number of points being compared, the selecting principles of the number of trajectory-spline curve points are confirmed: Under the condition that the accuracy of crucial measurement of the trajectory, the less selection of points, the better result will be. Since the selection of simulation step size has a direct influence on the accuracy of the calculation and the time of simulation, the simulation results show that 0.001s is the best step size for the above-mentioned model.The speed comparison between the simulation and experimental measurement of ring-style roller coaster proves the feasibility on the modeling and simulation method which are applied in the study of kinematics and dynamics of roller coaster. The methods and relative curves mentioned in the paper can provide evidence to the functional inspection of roller coaster and the supporting structure forces analysis. The method pushes forward the application of virtual prototyping technology on engineering field, especially on roller coasters, which offers a practical approach for products design, as well as the quality improvement of roller coasters in the future.