Araz Hasheminezhad
International Journal of Railway, vol. 7, no. 1, pp.16-23, 2014

Abstract : Reduction in railway-induced vibrations in urban areas is a very challenging task in railway transportation. Many mitigation measures can be considered and applied. Among these, a little attention has been paid to trenches. In this study, a numerical investigation on the effectiveness of in-filled trenches with pipes in reducing railway vibrations due to passing trains is presented. Particularly, a series of two-dimensional dynamic analysis was performed to model the behavior of ballasted railway track under harmonic load with ABAQUS software as a Finite Element method. In so doing, two types of in-filled trenches with pipes with steel and concrete materials have been investigated in this paper. In addition, effectiveness of pipes made of steel and concrete, filled with loose sand and clay in railway-induced vibration reduction has been assessed. The results point out that using in-filled trench with pipes does not effective a lot on railway-induced vibration reduction in comparison to other railway-induced vibration reduction methods. However, in-filled trenches with steel pipes are much more effective than in-filled trenches with concrete pipes. Moreover, filling pipes with loose sand and clay does not have any effect on vibration reduction efficiency of these in-filled trenches.

Keyword : Vibration reduction, In-filled trenches, Finite element method, Pipe