Ballast fouling inspection and quantification with ground penetrating radar (GPR)

Yunlong Guo, Guixian Liu*, Guoqing Jing, Jianjun Qu, Shilei Wang, Weile Qiang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)
163 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been applied for ballast layer inspection for two decades, mainly for the analysis of ballast layer fouling levels. However, some issues that affect the inspection quality remain unsolved, such as issues involving the GPR equipment quality (antenna) and the correlation between the GPR indicator and fouling index. With the aim of solving these two issues, in this paper, we investigated the difference between the results of two different antennas, the GPR data processing technique, indicators for the fouling level (by GPR signal processing) and the correlation between the indicators and fouling index (obtained by sieving). The results show that the antenna quality determines the inspection quality. The indicators can reflect the ballast layer fouling level, and they correlate the best with the fouling index (obtained by the percentage of particles passing through a 5 mm sieve size). This study is helpful for the future modification of railway ballast maintenance standards.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)151-168
Number of pages18
JournalInternational Journal of Rail Transportation
Volume11
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Keywords

  • ballast fouling
  • GPR
  • Ground penetrating radar
  • railway ballast
  • track geometry
  • track inspection

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