FAST COMPUTATION OF TRAIN-INDUCED VIBRATIONS IN HOMOGENEOUS AND LAYERED SOILS

Abstract eng:
The computation of the wave propagation in homogeneous and layered soils can be performed by a numerical integration in wavenumber domain. The numerical difficulties of an infinite integral and an integrand with poles can be solved. But if this computation must be repeated for many distances, many frequencies, many loads, or many soil models, it becomes a time consuming task which is not acceptable for a user-friendly prediction tool for railway induced ground vibration. Therefore, an approximate method for the computation of the wave field has been developed. The computation consists of several steps. At first, an approximate dispersion profile is calculated according to rules which have been derived from exact solutions. Secondly, the dispersion is used to achieve the amplitude for a certain frequency and a certain distance by calculating the approximate solution of a corresponding homogeneous half-space. Thirdly, three layer corrections are added which include lowfrequency near-field effects, high-frequency far-field effects, and a resonance amplification around the layer frequency. This procedure yields the wave field due to a point load. For a train load, many of these point-load responses have to be summed up, and a frequencydependant reduction factor has to be multiplied to incorporate the effect of the load distribution along and across the track. - The prediction method is applied to real sites, and the appropriate soil models are identified by approximating the measured transfer functions (frequency-dependant amplitudes) which is presented as an alternative to the approximation of the dispersion (frequency-dependant wave velocities). These examples demonstrate the general behavior of layered soils: the low amplitudes of the stiff half-space at low frequencies, the high amplitudes of the softer layer at high frequencies, the strong increase of amplitudes and a possible resonance amplification at mid frequencies. The material damping of the layer yields a strong attenuation of the amplitudes with the distance for high frequencies. The response depends strongly on the resonance or layer frequency which is shown for different layer depths and velocities always in good agreement with measurements. The layer frequency can be of immense influence if train-speed effects are analysed in a layered soil. The good agreement with many measurements in this contribution as well as in the

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