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Testing and Monitoring in Railway Tracks

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Advances on Testing and Experimentation in Civil Engineering

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Abstract

Railway tracks may be perceived as simple physical structures, but in fact they entail a significant level of complexity as refers to the assessment and prediction of their transient and long-term behaviors. These mostly result from the intrinsic characteristics of their components and of the dynamic interaction with the successive passing trains at different speeds and with different loading characteristics. The railway industry’s traditionally conservative approach to new technologies and the limited access, mostly for safety reasons, to related infrastructures somewhat hinder new developments and make it difficult to obtain further insight into the behavior of these structures. To overcome these limitations, advanced methods have been proposed for characterizing the materials that integrate the tracks and a few developments have been implemented in the monitoring of the structures under static and dynamic loading conditions. The information obtained has been essential to validate track models and to predict the transient response and the degradation behavior of the structures and their materials. This has promoted the introduction of new materials and construction methods with a view to improve the structural and environmental performances of railway infrastructures. The work presented herein provides an overview of current and advanced characterization and monitoring techniques, which are exemplified by a few applications concerning both R&D and consulting initiatives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LNEC, National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, Lisbon, Portugal

    Eduardo Fortunato & André Paixão

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  1. Eduardo Fortunato
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  2. André Paixão
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Correspondence to Eduardo Fortunato .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CERIS, NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Carlos Chastre

  2. CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    José Neves

  3. CONSTRUCT-LESE, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Diogo Ribeiro

  4. NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Maria Graça Neves

  5. CERIS, NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Paulina Faria

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Fortunato, E., Paixão, A. (2023). Testing and Monitoring in Railway Tracks. In: Chastre, C., Neves, J., Ribeiro, D., Neves, M.G., Faria, P. (eds) Advances on Testing and Experimentation in Civil Engineering. Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05875-2_10

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