Ballast as a part of the railway system plays an important role in the operation of the railways and also has a great impact on repair and maintenance activities. Hence most of the repair and maintenance activities in traditional railway systems are due to the defections in the ballast layer and therefore most of the maintenance budget is spent on repairing these defects. These repair and maint...

current practices in railway track analysis and design are reviewed and discussed in this paper. the mechanical behavior of railway track structure comprising of various components has not been fully understood due to the railway track structural complexity. although there have been some improvements in the accuracy of current track design methods in recent decades, there are still considerable...

Numerical simulation with discrete elements leads to several issues for large scale problems and long loading times, as for the granular dynamic simulations of the ballasted railway behavior. To reduce computational costs, we study the use of two strategies: domain decomposition methods and shared-memory parallelization with OpenMP. An example of a maintenance process, the tamping, on a portion...

ballast as a part of the railway system plays an important role in the operation of the railways and also has a great impact on repair and maintenance activities. hence most of the repair and maintenance activities in traditional railway systems are due to the defections in the ballast layer and therefore most of the maintenance budget is spent on repairing these defects. these repair and maint...

Simulation of a large number of deformable bodies is often difficult because complex high-level modeling is required to address both multi-body contact and viscoelastic deformation. This necessitates the combined use of a discrete element method (DEM) and a finite element method (FEM). In this study, a quadruple discrete element method (QDEM) was developed for dynamic analysis of viscoelastic m...

Major growth in rail traffic in many parts of the world in recent years has brought railway networks close to capacity and restricted the time available for track access to carry out maintenance work without costly temporary route closures. There are, therefore, significant benefits in designing or modifying ballasted track systems to reduce maintenance and associated access requirements. Under...