TY - GEN
T1 - Railroad Ballast Movements Pattern Recognition by Using “SmartRock”
AU - Zeng, Kun
AU - Huang, Hai
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Ballast is an important part of railroad infrastructure. It is used as a support base for bearing the track load and facilitating drainage of water from the track. Unfavorable ballast performances (e.g., ballast fouling, loss of lateral confinement) can contribute to damage and deterioration of rail structures such as the rail, tie and fastening components. Therefore, accurate and timely monitoring of ballast condition is critical for rail safety operation and effective maintenance. This paper presents a series of ballast box tests to investigate the ballast particle movement pattern inside railway ballast under different ballast, loading, moisture and shoulder confinement conditions. Eight wireless devices, SmartRocks, were embedded in different locations in the ballast box to monitor individual ballast particle movements. The results indicate that (1) load magnitude and frequency have apparent effect on ballast particle movements. (2) The difference of particle movements in fouled ballast under dry versus wet condition is more dramatic than the difference in clean ballast. (3) Lack of shoulder confinement would cause failure of interaction between the shoulder ballast with tie and surrounded particles, which could generate more space for ballast particles away from the shoulder translation and rolling above other particles. (4) This study also demonstrates that SmartRock is capable of recording the particle translational accelerations and particle angular rotations information under different ballast and load conditions.
AB - Ballast is an important part of railroad infrastructure. It is used as a support base for bearing the track load and facilitating drainage of water from the track. Unfavorable ballast performances (e.g., ballast fouling, loss of lateral confinement) can contribute to damage and deterioration of rail structures such as the rail, tie and fastening components. Therefore, accurate and timely monitoring of ballast condition is critical for rail safety operation and effective maintenance. This paper presents a series of ballast box tests to investigate the ballast particle movement pattern inside railway ballast under different ballast, loading, moisture and shoulder confinement conditions. Eight wireless devices, SmartRocks, were embedded in different locations in the ballast box to monitor individual ballast particle movements. The results indicate that (1) load magnitude and frequency have apparent effect on ballast particle movements. (2) The difference of particle movements in fouled ballast under dry versus wet condition is more dramatic than the difference in clean ballast. (3) Lack of shoulder confinement would cause failure of interaction between the shoulder ballast with tie and surrounded particles, which could generate more space for ballast particles away from the shoulder translation and rolling above other particles. (4) This study also demonstrates that SmartRock is capable of recording the particle translational accelerations and particle angular rotations information under different ballast and load conditions.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-77234-5_17
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-77234-5_17
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85113252360
SN - 9783030772338
T3 - Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering
SP - 209
EP - 218
BT - Advances in Transportation Geotechnics IV - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Transportation Geotechnics
A2 - Tutumluer, Erol
A2 - Nazarian, Soheil
A2 - Al-Qadi, Imad
A2 - Qamhia, Issam I. A.
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
T2 - 4th International Conference on Transportation Geotechnics, ICTG 2021
Y2 - 23 May 2021 through 26 May 2021
ER -