Discrete Element Analysis on Mechanical Properties of Ballast Bed by Tamping in Railway Turnout Areas

Discrete Element Analysis on Mechanical Properties of Ballast Bed by Tamping in Railway Turnout Areas

Chi, Yihao (Beijing Jiaotong University)
Xiao, Hong (Beijing Jiaotong University)
Zhang, Zhihai (Beijing Jiaotong University)
Fang, Shuwei (Line Branch Company)
Wang, Haoyu (TU Delft Mechanics and Physics of Structures)

2022

Turnout is the key component of the railway tracks for trains to change direction, which is vital to operational safety and passenger comfort. Therefore, it is of great importance to perform a scientific and reasonable tamping operation for turnout areas. In this paper, based on the commercial software EDEM and RECURDYN, a coupled simulation model of the large machine tamping device-rail-sleeper-ballast bed in the turnout area is jointly established, and the correctness of the model is verified by the test results of the lateral resistance of the ballast bed. The influence of tamping operation on the macro-and micromechanical properties of ballast bed at the switching part of railway turnout areas is studied and recommendations for the optimization of tamping operation are proposed. The results show that in the squeezing stage, strong force chains are distributed concentrately under sleepers, where the distribution range is approximately elliptical with a depth of 150 mm. After tamping, only the 200-mm ballast under the sleepers is compacted, where the compactness is increased by 5.9%. On the contrary, the compactness of the ballast in the sleeper crib is reduced by 27.4%, which is the weakest part. To ensure favorable tamping quality, the tamping sequence at the switching part of railway turnout areas is suggested to be conducted in order of first through track and then diverging track.

ballast track
discrete element method (DEM)
macro
micro mechanical properties
tamping operation
turnout

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d604d2f4-2a01-40d6-9dde-2a6b4b77859f

https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4055429

2023-07-01

1555-1415

Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, 17 (11)

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Yihao Chi, Hong Xiao, Zhihai Zhang, Shuwei Fang, Haoyu Wang