Evaluation of the effect of particle shape on the bearing capacity of railroad ballast with discontinuous analysis

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of particle properties such as particle shape and grain size distribution of particle assemblage on the bearing capacity of railroad ballast in numerical simulations with discontinuous analysis. To evaluate the effect quantitatively, a se-ries of numerical simulations that regard a ballast particle as a regular or an irregular polygon were performed. By comparing model tests of ballasted track with the numerical simulations, the validity of modeling methods of railroad ballast in discontinuous analysis was examined in terms of the shape of ballast particles and the grain size distribution of railroad ballast. As the result, it can be observed that the particle shape of numerical models, especially the angu-larity has a greater effect on the bearing capacity of railroad ballast than the grain size distri-bution, and that the imitation of the shape of real ballast particles makes analytical results similar to experimental results.