Abstract: The Galerkin truncation method is a commonly used method to study the dynamic response of vehicle-pavement systems. The pavement and the vehicle are modeled as a sandwich beam on the nonlinear viscoelastic foundation and a spring vibrator with uniform speed, respectively. The coupled vibration equation of vehicle-pavement system is established. Two effective schemes for determining the Galerkin truncation convergence term based on the linear natural frequency of the pavement are proposed. The convergence of the coupled vibration response is analyzed. The pavement response and the vehicle vibration displacement at different speeds are observed. The influence of the Galerkin truncation term on the convergence of the system under different pavement thickness is analyzed. The effects of the vehicle suspension stiffness and damping, road roughness wavelength and amplitude on the pavement deformation and the vehicle vibration displacement when the system reaches convergence are discussed. Numerical investigations prove that the proposed schemes have high accuracy for judging the convergence of the vehicle-pavement system, and can greatly improve the calculation efficiency. It has a certain role in promoting researchers to solve the dynamic problems of vehicle-pavement system.

Key words: Galerkin method, convergence, coupled vibration, sandwich beam