Assessment of sleeper support conditions using micro-tremor analysis

Abstract

An irregular geometry of the track can influence the safe passage of railway traffic. Therefore, maintenance activities on railways are mostly directed towards the correction of track geometry. It has been shown that unevenly supported and unsupported sleepers make major contributions to the effect of track geometry deterioration. In addition, irregular sleeper support conditions can contribute to ballast fouling, thus reducing its service life. Therefore, assessing the support conditions of the sleepers in a railway track is essential. This paper reviews methods that can be used for this purpose. Then, we propose a method for the assessment of sleeper support conditions and present results obtained in field investigations. The proposed method is based on sampling of the micro-tremor on sleepers and interpretation of obtained data. The obtained results prove that the proposed method is reliable and therefore usable in practice.