To deal with a rapid development of high-speed trains and high-speed railways, constant improvement of the railway infrastructure is necessary and engineers are continuously facing challenges in order to design efficient and optimized structures.
Nowadays, more and more railway bridges are built and thus, they require the engineers’ attention both regarding their design and their maintenance. A comprehensive knowledge of the infrastructures and the trains is crucial: their behaviours need to be well known.
However, today, the ballast – the granular material disposed on the track and on which the rails lie – is not well known and its effect in dynamic analyses are rarely accounted for. Engineers are still investigating the role played by the ballast in the dynamic behaviour of bridges.
This master thesis aims at quantifying the influence of the ballast on the dynamic properties of a bridge. Is the ballast just an additional mass on the structure or does it introduce any additional stiffness? Thus, this project investigates different alternatives and parameters to propose a realistic and reliable model for the ballast superstructure and the track.
For the purpose of this study, a simply supported steel truss bridge located in Poland is studied. The bridge was excited by a harmonic force and the interesting point regarding the experiments is that acceleration measurements were collected before and after the ballasted track setting up on the bridge deck. Then, these data are processed through MATLAB in order to obtain the natural frequencies of the bridge at two different times during its construction.
The determined natural frequencies for the un-ballasted case are then compared with analytical values obtained with a 3D finite element model implemented in the software LUSAS. This step aims at calibrating the un-ballasted finite element model so that the bridge is represented as realistically as possible.
Once it has been done, a model both for the ballast and the track is proposed using solid elements for the ballast superstructure and beam elements for the rails, the guard rails and the sleepers. Different parameters influencing the natural frequencies and modes shapes of the bridge are testing and it appears that the ballast introduces an additional stiffness through a bending stiffness in the ballast and a change in the support conditions.
Finally, the contribution of these parameters is assessed and discussed: the stiffness of the ballast increases the stiffness of the bridge by more than 20% for the 2nd vertical bending vibration mode and the support conditions increase the bridge’s stiffness by more than 15% and 30% respectively for the 1stvertical bending the 1st torsional vibration modes.
Source: KTH
Author: Bornet, Lucie
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