Abstract
Vibration assessments are required for new railroad lines to determine the effect of vibrations on local communities. Low accuracy assessments can significantly increase future project costs in the form of further detailed assessment or unexpected vibration abatement measures.This paper presents a new, high accuracy, initial assessment prediction tool for high speed lines. A key advantage of the new approach is that it is capable of including the effect of soil conditions in its calculation. This is novel because current scoping models ignore soil conditions, despite such characteristics being the most dominant factor in vibration propagation. The model also has zero run times thus allowing for the rapid assessment of vibration levels across rail networks.First, the development of the new tool is outlined. It is founded upon using a fully validated three dimensional finite element model to generate synthetic vibration records for a wide range of soil types. These records are analysed using a machine learning approach to map relationships between soil conditions, train speed and vibration levels. Its performance is tested through the prediction of two independent international vibration metrics on four European high speed lines and it is found to have high prediction accuracy.A key benefit from this increased prediction accuracy is that it potentially reduces the volume of detailed vibration analyses required for a new high speed train line. This avoids costly in-depth studies in the form of field experiments or large numerical models. Therefore the use of the new tool can result in cost savings.
Highlights
High speed rail infrastructure is experience rapid international growth
As part of the field work undertaken in Belgium, three of the most common steel wheeled high speed train types found in Europe were recorded (Eurostar, TGV and Thalys)
The vibration levels at all distances were found to be slightly elevated for Eurostar passages, the overall responses were similar for all trains (Fig. 11)
Summary
High speed rail infrastructure is experience rapid international growth. This growth has led to a desire to construct new railway lines in urban environments. It was used for predicting vibration levels on a high speed rail track between Oslo city and Oslo airport. The Federal Railroad Administration approach [10] was based on a collection of ground-borne velocity and acceleration recordings from European railway sites These results were converted to 1/3 octave bands [26] and statistically analysed to determine correlations between a discrete number of track setups. A limitation of [10] was that the soil properties at each site were not determined [12], meaning the model ignored the effect of soil conditions on wave propagation Factors such as Rayleigh wave speed were not considered in the vibration prediction.
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