Effect Of Concrete Sleeper Type And Spacing On Lateral Resistance Of Curved Track

Railway tracks should resist heavy loads that come from the axel of a train without causingrnexcessive defects while allowing reasonable speed of the train. Due to the increment of thernspeed and the axle load, the amplitude of lateral forces exerted on railway track has beenrnincreased hence, affects the track lateral stability especially on curved phase. rnIn this thesis, variations on the finite element models has been made to study the responsernof the track when different shape of concrete sleepers and spacing are used at curvedrnsection of ballasted railway track. Models with four types of concrete sleepers has beenrndeveloped and used and the result have been validated using field experiments. The resultsrnshowed that side-winged sleeper, bottom winged sleeper and frictional sleeper improvesrnlateral resistance by 40%, 41% and 42% respectively, when compared to the conventionalrnType II sleeper. In addition, three values of sleeper spacing have been used on therndeveloped model to investigate the effect on lateral resistance of the track. The resultrnindicates that decreasing of the spacing between sleepers leads to increasing in lateralrnresistance of the track but decreasing beyond spacing of 600 mm has insignificantrndifference. The outcome of this study reveals that frictional sleeper had better lateralrnresistance compere to other types and can potentially be used on curved section.

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