Forde, Mike

Giannopoulos, Antonis

De Bold, Robert Paul

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

2011-08-01T12:42:36Z

2011-08-01T12:42:36Z

2011-06-28

The “green agenda” combined with highway congestion has accelerated the demand for increased freight and passenger travel on the world’s railways. These increases have driven demand for more efficient and rapid investigation of trackbed ballast. Network Rail and other rail infrastructure operators spend significant financial sums on inspecting, tamping, adjusting, cleaning, and replacing trackbed ballast. Such maintenance is often to the detriment of normal network operation. Industry requires a method of ballast evaluation that is non-intrusive, cheap, can appraise long stretches of track in a short period of time, and give a fingerprinting result from which time-to-maintenance can be calculated and planned. Thus, the aim was to develop evaluation methods using non-destructive testing techniques. A 10-year old full-scale trackbed composed of variously fouled ballast was re-visited and used for experimentation. The condition of the ballast was calculated using the Ionescu Fouling Index. Earlier research at the University of Edinburgh enabled researchers worldwide to characterise ballast using ground penetrating radar (GPR). This research was repeated, validated and taken forward in a series of GPR experiments on the trackbed using a range of antennas from 500MHz to 2.6GHz. New "scatter" metrics were developed to determine ballast condition from the GPR waveforms. These metrics were then used to predict the Ionescu Fouling Index with a correlation coefficient greater than 0.9. One of the current approaches to evaluating the stiffness of railway ballast is to use a Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD). The viability of using a Prima 100 mini-FWD on railways to measure stiffness was determined and deemed to be ineffective on ballast. The applicability of the impulse response technique on railways was determined. An instrumented hammer was used to excite the ballast, with a geophone measuring the response. The Frequency Response Function of this was successfully correlated with the Ionescu Fouling Index with a correlation coefficient also greater than 0.9. Finally, using GPR data and measured stiffness data collected by Banverket, Sweden, a numerical model to successfully relate radar responses to stiffness was developed.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5027

en

The University of Edinburgh

De Bold, R., Connolly, D., Patience, S. & Forde, M.C., 2010b. Using frequency response function testing to examine a railway trackbed. In National Academies Transportation Research Board (TRB), Proc 89th Annual Meeting. Washington DC, USA, 10-14 January 2010, paper no. 10-3033, 2010b.

De Bold, R., Morrissey, J.P., O'Connor, G. & Forde, M.C., 2010a. New analysis of ground penetrating radar testing of a mixed railway trackbed. In National Academies Transportation Research Board (TRB), Proc 89th Annual Meeting. Washington DC, USA, 10-14 January 2010, paper no. 10-3142, 2010a.

railway maintenance

GPR

ground penetrating radar

ballast

spent

fouling

impulse response

Non-destructive evaluation of railway trackbed ballast

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy