Moving loads on beams on Winkler foundations with passive frictional damping devices

A program in Matlab environment based on the finite element method (FEM) that simulates the dynamic behavior of the beam, foundation and frictional damping devices driven by a moving load, is developed and used to study the effect of the frictional dissipation on the values of the critical velocities and dynamic amplifications. The time integration of the global equations of the motion is performed using the nonsmooth contact dynamics method (NSCD) with persistent contact, especially conceived for friction problems which are governed by a nonsmooth constitutive law.