Fouled railway ballast modeling using rigid body simulation

International Conference on Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), pp. 63–66

Abstract

Rail transportation is one of the most efficient ways to transport passengers and products on land. In line with the economic expansion, expand of the railway network is also increasing accordingly. In addition to designing and building, railway maintenance is an equally important task to ensure safety conditions and efficient operation. One of the challenges of railway maintenance is to get a good insight into the track substructure status (ballast, sub-ballast and subgrade). Due to its sensing capabilities, ground penetrating radar (GPR) systems have become an important tool to assess railroad conditions in the past years (Brown and Li, 2017; Ciampoli et al., 2018; Kuo et al., 2018). GPR methods, hardware and signal processing are also continuously evolving to provide with more accurate ways to analyze the track structure. Usually these capabilities have to be evaluated on the field, which is generally a time-consuming and expensive process. As alternative to this, computer simulations are becoming more accessible to users with an always increasing ability to reconstruct realistic measurement methods and soil conditions. The final goal of this study is to obtain realistic simulations of fouled ballast conditions for GPR. Rigid body dynamics simulations have been applied to generate realistic gravel structures using stone particles that were randomly generated. To simulate additional soil layers and dust in the ballast, models for homogeneous soils were used. This geometry was imported into the gprMax simulation software (Warren, 2016; Warren, 2018) to obtain the GPR response.

Authors 3

1. Thoetphan Kingsuwannaphong Aachen Institute of High Frequency Technology

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of High Frequency Technology, RWTH Aachen University

2. Christian Bräu

   Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques

   Affiliation as printed

   Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR)

3. Dirk Heberling Aachen Institute of High Frequency Technology

   RWTH Aachen University · Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of High Frequency Technology, RWTH Aachen University and Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR)