Strength and deformation characteristics of railroad ballast in ballast particle abrasion process

Abstract

In order to clarify the strength and deformation properties of ballast during the abrasion process, a series of abraded ballast particle shape evaluations, as well as large triaxial compression and cyclic loading tests with a large-scale track model using abraded ballast particles were performed. Based on the test results, this paper investigates the degree of abrasion of ballast particles, their shape properties, their strength and deformation properties and settlement characteristics under cyclic train loads. It was found that the shape evaluation method using a normalized argument function is an effective method to evaluate the abraded state of ballast particles.