Effect of Concrete Sleeper Type and Spacing on Lateral Resistance of curved Track
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Date
2019-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Railway tracks should resist heavy loads that come from the axel of a train without causing
excessive defects while allowing reasonable speed of the train. Due to the increment of the
speed and the axle load, the amplitude of lateral forces exerted on railway track has been
increased hence, affects the track lateral stability especially on curved phase.
In this thesis, variations on the finite element models has been made to study the response
of the track when different shape of concrete sleepers and spacing are used at curved
section of ballasted railway track. Models with four types of concrete sleepers has been
developed and used and the result have been validated using field experiments. The results
showed that side-winged sleeper, bottom winged sleeper and frictional sleeper improves
lateral resistance by 40%, 41% and 42% respectively, when compared to the conventional
Type II sleeper. In addition, three values of sleeper spacing have been used on the
developed model to investigate the effect on lateral resistance of the track. The result
indicates that decreasing of the spacing between sleepers leads to increasing in lateral
resistance of the track but decreasing beyond spacing of 600 mm has insignificant
difference. The outcome of this study reveals that frictional sleeper had better lateral
resistance compere to other types and can potentially be used on curved section.
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Keywords
Curved track lateral stability, Concrete sleeper, Sleeper spacing, Lateral load, Abaqus