Abstract
Railway ballast plays an important role in the economic efficiency and sustainability of the rail transport. In this context, the morphology of its particles, in what regards the shape, angularity and surface texture, is critical and affects the mechanical performance of this aggregate material. Minimum mechanical resistance requirements ensure that the material undergoes limited degradation and preserves optimal morphological parameters throughout its field use. Many current technical specifications require the characterization of the morphology of ballast particles which is performed according to well-established and extensively validated empirical and manual testing approaches that were developed in the past. However, some of these approaches are subjective, prone to human error, reductive of the three-dimensional aspects of the particles and do not take advantage of more recent knowledge and currently available automated methods and image analysis approaches to fully characterize these aggregates. In this work, the authors present the application of a photogrammetry method for 3D reconstruction of ballast particles, as an alternative to other significantly expensive approaches. Ballast samples were submitted to micro-Deval abrasion testing, and the evolution of the morphology of a set of particles was analyzed at different stages of that test. Recent and automated image analysis techniques were applied to evaluate changes in the particle morphology. This work demonstrates that close-range photogrammetry for the 3D scanning of ballast particles is a cost-efficient approach to study these aggregates.
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Acknowledgements
The first author’s postdoctoral fellowship [SFRH/BPD/107737/2015] was supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through POCH co-financed by the ESF and national funds of MCTES, Portugal. The third author’s Ph.D. fellowship [201518/2015-5] was supported by National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) from Brazil. Part of this work was conducted in the framework of the TC202 national committee of the Portuguese Geotechnical Society (SPG) “Transportation Geotechnics,” in association with the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE-TC202).
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Paixão, A., Afonso, C., Delgado, B., Fortunato, E. (2022). Evaluation of Ballast Particle Degradation Under Micro-Deval Testing Using Photogrammetry. In: Tutumluer, E., Nazarian, S., Al-Qadi, I., Qamhia, I.I. (eds) Advances in Transportation Geotechnics IV. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 165. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77234-5_10
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