Quantification of the Mechanized Ballast Cleaning Process Efficiency Using GPR Technology

Anna Borkovcová,Filip Ševčík,Vladislav Borecký,Salih Serkan Artagan

doi:10.3390/rs13081510

Anna Borkovcová, Filip Ševčík + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13081510

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Abstract

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has been used recently for diagnostics of the railway infrastructure, particularly the ballast layer. To overcome ballast fouling, mechanized ballast cleaning process, which increases track occupancy time and cost, is usually used. Hence it is of crucial significance to identify at which stage of track ballast life cycle, and level of fouling, ballast cleaning should be initiated. In the present study, a series of in situ GPR surveys on selected railway track sections in Czechia was performed to obtain railway granite ballast relative dielectric permittivity (RDP) values in several phases of railway track lifecycle. GPR data were collected in the form of B-scan, and time-domain analysis was used for post-processing. The results indicate (i) change of railway ballast RDP in time (long term); (ii) a dependency of ballast fouling level on RDP; and (iii) the RDP change during the ballast cleaning process, thus its efficiency. This research aimed to provide new perspectives into the decision-making process in initiating the mechanized ballast cleaning intervention based on the GPR-measured data.

Highlights

Increasing service frequencies for railway freight and passenger along with the high safety, sustainability, and reliability requirements, railways necessitate optimized strategic planning and decision-making for the maintenance activities, which should be figured out based on extensive and reliable fault detection methodologies
This paper presented the condition monitoring of the railway granite ballast layer and identifying the variation of the degree of fouling by Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)
GPR surveys were undertaken in eight track sections with a total length of 400 m within the Čáslav-Kutná Hora railway track, using two types of antennas with three dissimilar central frequencies and two different antenna orientations

Summary

Introduction

Increasing service frequencies for railway freight and passenger along with the high safety, sustainability, and reliability requirements, railways necessitate optimized strategic planning and decision-making for the maintenance activities, which should be figured out based on extensive and reliable fault detection methodologies. Near-field zone effect should be noted here in the case of ground-coupled antennas This case happens owing to the powerful EM field within the vicinity of the antenna covering a radius of approximately 1.5 times the wavelength of the central frequency developed by EM energy transmitted from the surface of the antenna. A devoted data processing flow was used taking into account the intervals and the width of the sleepers to ensure that RDP computations would be made in the picked traces positioned precisely within the cribs, which would avoid the obstructive impacts of the reinforced concrete sleepers in the GPR signals For this purpose, a text file was formed including the computed trace spacings corresponding to the start and the end points of each crib. 228 traces were assessed in each phase, and RDP values were calculated

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