Railway ballast is an angular and coarse material, which demands careful DEM modelling and validation. Particle shape is often modelled in high accuracy, thus leading to computational expensive DEM models. Whether this effort will increase the DEM model’s overall prediction quality will also vitally depend on the used contact law and the validation process. In general, a DEM model validated using different types of principal experiments can be considered more trustworthy in simulating other load cases. Here, two types of railway ballast are compared and DEM model validation is conducted. Calcite and Kieselkalk are investigated under compression and direct shear test. All experimental data will be made openly accessible to promote further research on this topic. In the experiments, the behaviour of Calcite and Kieselkalk is surprisingly similar in the direct shear test, while clear differences can be seen in the stiffnesses in the compression test. In DEM modelling, simple particle shapes are combined with the Conical Damage Model contact law. For each type of ballast, one set of parameters is found, such that simulation and experimental results are in good accordance. A comparison with the simplified Hertz-Mindlin contact law shows several drawbacks of this model. First, the model cannot be calibrated to meet both compression and shear test results. Second, the similar behaviour in shear testing but differences in compression cannot be reproduced using the Hertz-Mindlin model. For these reasons, the CDM model is considered the better choice for the simulation of railway ballast, if simple particle shapes are used.

In any DEM simulation, the chosen particle shape will greatly influence the simulated material behaviour. For a specific material, e.g. railway ballast, it remains an open question how to model the particle shape, such that DEM simulations are computationally efficient and simulation results are in good accordance with measurements. While DEM shape modelling for railway ballast is well addressed in the literature, approaches mainly aim at approximating the stones' actual shape, resulting in rather complex and thus inefficient particle shapes. In contrast, very simple DEM shapes will be constructed, clumps of three spheres, which aim to approximate shape descriptors of the considered ballast material. In DEM simulations of the packing behaviour, a set of clump shapes is identified, which can pack at porosities observed at track sites, as well as in lab tests. The relation between particle shape (descriptors) and obtained packing (characteristic) is investigated in a correlation analysis. The simulated packing's porosity is strongly correlated to four shape descriptors, which are also strongly correlated among each other. Thus, to derive simple shape models of a given particle shape, matching one of these shape descriptors, might be a good first step to bring simulated porosities closer to measured ones. The conducted correlation analysis also shows that packing's coordination number and isotropic fabric are correlated to more shape descriptors, making it more difficult to estimate the effect of particle shape on these quantities.

The prediction quality of discrete element method (DEM) models for railway ballast can be expected to depend on three points: the geometry representation of the single particles, the used contact models and the parametrisation using principal experiments. This works aims at a balanced approach, where none of the points is addressed with excessive depth. In a first step, a simple geometry representation is chosen and the simplified Hertz–Mindlin contact model is used. When experimental data of cyclic compression tests and monotonic direct shear tests are considered, the model can be parametrised to fit either one of the two tests, but not both with the same set of parameters. Similar problems can be found in literature for monotonic and cyclic triaxial tests of railway ballast. In this work, the comparison between experiment and simulation is conducted using the entire data of the test, e.g. shear force over shear path curve from the direct shear test. In addition to a visual comparison of the results also quantitative errors based on the sum of squares are defined. To improve the fit of the DEM model to both types of experiments, an extension on the Hertz–Mindlin contact law is used, which introduces additional physical effects (e.g. breakage of edges or yielding). This model introduces two extra material parameters and is successfully parametrised. Using only one set of parameters, the results of the DEM simulation are in good accordance with both experimental cyclic compression test and monotonic directs shear test.

particle shape analysis is conducted, to compare two types of railway ballast: calcite and Kieselkalk. Focus lies on the characterisation of particle angularity using 3D scanner data. In the literature, angularity is often characterised using 2D data, as these types of data are easier to collect. 3D scanner data contain a vast amount of information (e.g. curvatures) which can be used for shape analysis and angularity characterisation. Literature approaches that use 3D data are often not thoroughly tested, due to a lack of test cases. in this work, two new curvature-based angularity indices are introduced and compared to one from the literature. Analytical test bodies with shapes ranging from spherical towards cubic are used for a first plausibility test. Then, 3D scans of ballast stones are compared to artificially rounded meshes. Only one out of three evaluated angularity indices seem to be suited to characterise angularity correctly in all of the above tests: the newly introduced scaled Willmore energy. A complete shape analysis of the scanned ballast stones is conducted and no difference between the two types of ballast can be seen regarding form, angularity, roughness, sphericity or convexity index. These findings of shape analysis are set in the context of previous works, where experimental results and DEM simulations of uniaxial compression tests and direct shear tests were presented for the same ballast types.

Contact friction is a key influence factor for the shearing behaviour of granular media. In the Discrete Element Method (DEM) contact friction is usually modelled with Coulomb's law assuming a constant interparticle friction coefficient. From tribology it is known that friction is influenced by several factors, e.g., temperature, normal stress, surface condition, etc. None of these influences can be modeled with the constant interparticle friction coefficient from Coulomb's law. For a given granular material (particle shape distribution), the usage of constant interparticle friction in DEM models generally results in constant bulk friction coefficients in the simulation of direct shear tests. While this is frequently seen in experiments with equi-sized spherical particles, papers exist in literature which report a stress dependency of bulk friction for non-spherical particles of certain materials. In this work, a stress dependency of bulk friction is obtained by introducing a model for stress dependent interparticle friction in DEM simulations. For validation experimental results of direct shear tests conducted on single or paired glass beads are used. While the bulk friction of paired spheres clearly decreases with increasing normal stress, it is nearly constant for single spheres. DEM simulations with the stress dependent interparticle friction are in good accordance with the experimental results of both single and paired spheres. A comparison with simulations, using constant interparticle friction, clearly shows the advantage of the proposed model.