Stiffness and strength characteristics of demolition waste, glass and plastics in railway capping layers

Abstract

The increased generation of demolition waste has led to the successful implementation of its utilization in civil engineering projects. The combination of recycled aggregates and supplementary materials can potentially improve the quality of geomaterials when constructing alternative railway capping layers. In this research, two types of demolition waste, namely, Recycled Concrete Aggregates (RCA) and Crushed Brick (CB), were studied in comparison to two Conventional Capping Materials (CCMs), which are currently used for railway track construction. Recycled Glass (RG) and Mixed Recovered Plastic (MRP) were also blended with RCA to assess their performance. All the materials and mixtures were evaluated in terms of both stiffness and strength. A new Repeated Load Triaxial (RLT) testing protocol was introduced based on the stress induced in the capping layers to determine the stiffness of the materials. A comparison was made among the current resilient modulus prediction models to find a model that would better fit the results for the demolition waste and mixtures. Multistage triaxial tests were also conducted to determine the strength, friction, stiffness and energy absorption capacity of the materials. It was found from this research study that RCA, CB and mixtures of RCA with RG and MRP have equivalent or higher levels of stiffness and strength than CCMs and are suitable alternatives for sustainable railway capping layer construction.