A Review on Intelligent Compaction Techniques in Railroad Construction

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to review Intelligent Compaction (IC) techniques, which is regarded relatively new to the railroad roadbed construction activity. Most of civil structures are built on roadbed that supposed to provide adequate load bearing support to the upper structure through the qualified compaction process. However, it is not uncommon for structure failure attributed to inadequate compaction control take place in field sites. Unlike traditional compaction control method to check field density at several locations, IC techniques continuously measure various compaction quality indices that represent compaction uniformity. In this paper, a series of literature review relevant to IC techniques was conducted to provide concise summary on the following categories: 1) background of IC technique; 2) Summary of IC vendors and basic principles; 3) modeling of IC behavior, and 4) case study along with correlation between IC with other measurements. In summary, IC technologies seem to be promising in future railroad construction to achieve better compaction quality control so that the serviceability of railroad can be ensured with minimizing rehabilitation and maintenance activities.