Supplementing granular ballast is one of the typical measures to treat the rail track irregularity concerning differential subgrade settlement, which results in the increase of ballast bed thickness. Engineering practices have shown that the track irregularity tends to be more frequent as ballast thickness increases. Although various studies are carried out to explore the influence of ballast bed thickness on its lateral resistance, the differential support of sleeper from rail suspension is rarely considered. In this study, we establish full-scale single-sleeper models via the discrete-element method, where the sleeper suspension is simulated by differential sleeper support. The simulation results show that lateral resistance increases with the ballast thickness, most of the increase comes from the sleeper bottom. However, when differential sleeper support is taken into consideration, the contribution of sleeper bottom to lateral resistance decreases significantly. Since the thicker ballast bed tends to have larger deformation and thus differential support of sleeper, thicker ballast bed could exhibit smaller lateral resistance.
The Influence of Ballast Bed Thickness on the Lateral Resistance with Consideration of Sleeper Suspension
Third International Conference on Rail Transportation ; 2024 ; Shanghai, China
ICRT 2024 ; 360-370
2025-03-18
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
The sleeper group influences on lateral resistance and stability of ballast bed
Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2023
|Study of the lateral resistance characteristics of ballast bed considering the sleeper group effect
SAGE Publications | 2023
|Deflection of Sleeper in Ballast
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1995
|