Numerical Investigation of Pre-Stressed Reinforced Concrete Railway Sleeper for High-Speed Application

The current paper deals with the numerical investigation of a unique designed pre-stressed reinforced concrete railway sleeper for the design speed of 300 km/h, as well as an axle load of 180 kN. The authors applied different methodologies in their research: traditional hand-made calculations and two types of finite element software. The latter were AxisVM and ABAQUS, respectively. During the calculations, the prestressing loss was not considered. The results from the three methods were compared with each other. The hand-made calculations and the finite element modeling executed by AxisVM software are adequate for determining the mechanical inner forces of the sleeper; however, ABAQUS is appropriate for consideration of enhanced and sophisticated material models, as well as the stress-state of the elements, i.e., concrete, pre-stressed tendons, etc. The authors certified the applicability of these methodologies for performing the dimensioning and design of reinforced concrete railway sleepers with pre-stressing technology. The research team would like to continue their research in an improved manner, taking into consideration real laboratory tests and validating the results from FE modeling, special material models that allow calculation of crackings and their effects in the concrete, and so that the real pattern of the crackings can be measured by GOM Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technology, etc.