Monitoring of railway structure with bituminous underlayment
Résumé
The phenomena of packing and wear of ballast, under dynamic stresses lead to high frequencies and high costs of maintenance. Several studies have shown that these settlements were linked to the high accelerations produced in the ballast by the passage of high-speed trains. To mitigate this problem, an innovative track structure, with an asphalt concrete layer under the ballast layer was built on the Bretagne-Pays de la Loire high-speed line. It is intended, among other things, to reduce the amplitude of the accelerations produced at the passage of High Speed Trains (HST).
The BPL lane includes 105 km with a sub-layer in asphalt concrete under the ballast, and 77 km with a granular sub-layer. In order to study the dynamic responses of these different structures and to understand the effect of the different layers on the dynamic response, four track sections were instrumented using, among others, accelerometers, strain gauges, temperature probes, etc. The acquisition of the data will be made during the test phase under controlled conditions and then under actual traffic.
In this article, we will present the different sensors of the instrumentation and their positions in the various sections as well as the acquisition system installed to collect all the measurements. First results of the different recordings of the sensors during the speed up test phase will be presented.