Remote monitoring for a high-speed railway subgrade structure state in a mountainous area and its response analysis

Abstract

High-speed railway engineering in mountainous areas suffers from occasional poor geological conditions, rugged topography, and complex hydrographic conditions. It is an important means of ensuring its safe operation to conduct real-time remote monitoring and analysis of the subgrade structure condition. Through analysing the stress characteristics of the mountainous subgrade, a complete monitoring system has been built and a corresponding software platform for datum acquisition and analysis has also been developed. After selecting a typical mountainous high-speed railway subgrade located in Hunan Province as the test section, the real-time monitoring of the subgrade structure in a static settling period, joint commissioning period, and an operational period was conducted and the primary condition datum was obtained. It is found that the dynamic response parameters have relatively slow attenuation velocities and the influencing depth of the high-speed train loads was about 4–5 m; when the structural state of the mountainous subgrade is healthy, subgrade deformations are small and, compared with the dynamic response datum of the subgrade in plain areas, the dynamic response of the mountainous high-speed railway subgrade was consistent. However, the long-term dynamic response and deformation of such mountainous subgrades still needs to be monitored, and analysed, continually.