Experimental Investigation of The Dynamic Behavior of Railway Track with Sleeper Voids

Abstract

EN: The deterioration of the sleeper support on the bal-lasted track begins with the accumulation of sleeper voids. Theincreased dynamic loading in the voided zone and the ballastcontact conditions cause the accelerated growth of the settle-ments in the voided zones, which results in the appearance oflocal instabilities like ballast breakdown, white spots, subgradedefects, etc. The recent detection and quantification of thesleeper voids with track-side and onboard monitoring can helpto avoid or delay the development of local instabilities. Thepresent paper is devoted to the study of the dynamic behavior ofrailway track with sleeper voids in the ballast breakdown zone.The result of the experimental track-side measurements of railacceleration and deflection is presented. The analysis shows theexistence of the dynamic impact during wheel entry in thevoided zone. However, the measured dynamic impact is sub-jected to the bias of the track-side measurement method. Boththe mechanism of the impact and the measurement aspects areexplained by using the one-beam model on viscoelastic foun-dation. The void features in the dynamic behavior are analyzedfor the purpose of track-side and onboard monitoring. A prac-tical method of the void parameter quantification is proposed.