Behavior of fresh and fouled railway ballast subjected to direct shear testing: discrete element simulation

By Buddhima Indraratna, N. T. Ngo, Cholachat Rujikiatkamjorn, Jayan S. Vinod. 2014

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

AbstractThis paper presents the three-dimensional discrete element method (DEM) that was used to study the shear behavior of fresh and coal fouled ballast in direct shear testing. The volumetric changes and stress-strain behavior of fresh and fouled ballast were simulated and compared with the experimental results. Clump logic in particle flow code in three dimensions (PFC3D) incorporated in a subroutine was used to simulate irregular-shaped particles in which groups of 10–20 spherical balls were clumped together in appropriate sizes to simulate ballast particles. Fouled ballast with a various void contaminant index (VCI) ranging from 20 to 70% VCI was modeled by injecting a specified number of miniature spherical particles into the voids of fresh ballast. The DEM simulation captures the behavior of fresh and fouled ballast as observed in the laboratory, showing that the peak shear stress of the ballast assembly decreases and the dilation of fouled ballast increases with an increasing VCI. Furthermore, th...

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17a7727d2359af056ddc2fa1b0aec35e4176bbb7