Block foundations for railway infrastructure - First centrifuge model tests
Block foundations for railway infrastructure - First centrifuge model tests
Block foundations have been used to support overhead lines in railway infrastructure for many years. Steckner (1989) and Sulzberger (1945) have developed an analytical design approach for block foundations subjected to horizontal and moment loading coming from the catenary mast. Recently, block foundations for railway infrastructure are built in more complex soil conditions, such as soft, fine-grained, layered sediments. The existing analytical design approach of Steckner and Sulzberger was not developed for such soil conditions, and therefore needs to be revised and extended for this type of soils. The load-bearing behaviour of block foundations in such soft soils is investigated through lateral pushover tests in the ETH Zurich geotechnical beam centrifuge. The paper focuses on the development of the experimental setup, such as the actuators used to apply horizontal loading on the catenary mast, the on-site created block foundation including details for attaching the mast, and the instrumentation to measure the deformation of the block foundation via mast-displacements in the horizontal and vertical direction. The first results of centrifuge model tests in sandy soils are described and critically discussed.
Andre Arnold; Ralf Herzog; Gregor Portmann; I. Anastasopoulos
5th European Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ECPMG2024)
Geotechnical infrastructure
https://doi.org/10.53243/ECPMG2024-7
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