Fundamental study on rapid detection of the insufficient lateral resistance of ballasted railway tracks by dynamic loading

Abstract

To resume trains operation as soon as possible after disasters, it is necessary to quickly find out locations of ballasted railway with insufficient lateral ballast resistance. In this study, a new method was proposed to evaluate the lateral ballast resistance using dynamic lateral excitation. The dynamic method was performed on 1/9-scale ballasted railway models with ballast densities of 1.5 and 1.6 g/cm3. The simple harmonic excitation was generated from a pair of 20g flywheels, and the accelerations of the vibrator and the central sleeper were recorded by sensors attached on the central sleeper and the vibrator, respectively. Based on the obtained data sets, maximum accelerations as well as the maximum amplitudes of the lateral displacements of the vibrator and the central sleeper were analysed. It was found that the maximum accelerations of the vibrator were higher than those of the central sleepers. This was also true for the maximum amplitude of the lateral displacements. The ratio of the maximum amplitude of the lateral displacement of the central sleeper to that of the vibrator was evaluated. It was found that the amplitude ratio of the track model with the ballast density of 1.5 g/cm3 was higher than that with the ballast density of 1.6 g/cm3. This implies that the difference in the lateral ballast resistance owing to the difference in the ballast density may be detected based on the evaluation of the amplitude ratio.