Condition monitoring of VFT‐Rail^® slab‐track railway bridges

Abstract

In 2010 the VFT‐Rail® system was approved in accordance with CEN and railway standards by Germany's Federal Railway Authority (EBA) for operational testing. The approval was accompanied by a monitoring campaign on a VFT‐Rail® bridge crossing the River Simmerbach. As a result of the positive experience gained during the operation of this bridge, two additional railway bridges were designed by SSF Ingenieure AG and put into service in 2014 by Deutsche Bahn (DB). To survey those bridges, a monitoring programme has been developed and instigated. The monitoring programme includes investigating the stress distribution between the concrete and specially designed composite dowels, which have a better fatigue resistance compared with conventional headed studs. The forces at several rail support points are also a focus of interest. The German railway operator DB Netz AG requested the survey to prove the applicability of state‐of‐the‐art calculation methods, which were not part of compulsory codes.

The evolution of the shape of composite dowels

“…This shear connection is currently being proceeded to obtain European Technical Specification (consistent with rules of Eurocode 4), and appropriate rules have been proposed by the project team SC4.T1 [52], and for purposes of this work, a list of papers considered as "background documents" for the design procedure of composite dowels are investigated and referenced. The list contains publications that include design guides [8,16,23], practical applications (bridges) [2,18,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42], and research [5,6,7,9,13,14,17,20,21,22,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. One can compare this list, which was compiled from the point of view of the author from Poland, with the papers being referenced in German publications [3] to obtain a wide and objective point of view (the first bridges were designed in these two countries as a cooperation between the first two co-authors).…”

Effects of transverse tension load on the static capacity and fatigue resistance of composite dowels

“…the railway bridges at Simmerbach (Fig. , , ) and Langenbach (Fig. ), have been completed with the help of the technical approval.…”

A Structural Health Monitoring Approach for Rail Fastening Systems

“…At the moment, the measured deformations are simply compared to given fixed deformation limits. In the event of a given limit value being exceeded, the client must be notified to check the rail fastening system which may have suffered damage [1].…”