An experimental/numerical hybrid methodology for the prediction of railway-induced ground-borne vibration on buildings to be constructed close to existing railway infrastructures: Numerical validation and parametric study

A novel experimental/numerical hybrid methodology for the assessment of railway-induced ground-borne vibration in buildings based on experimental measurements in the soil surface is proposed in this paper. This methodology has been specifically designed for the prediction of railway-induced vibration in buildings to be constructed close to an operative railway infrastructure, although it can be applied for other types of vibration sources. The model of the incident wave field induced by the railway infrastructure consists of a set of virtual forces applied in the soil, which would be obtained from vibration experimental measurements in the surface of the ground where the building will be constructed. These virtual forces can be subsequently applied to a model of the building-soil system to obtain a prediction of the vibration levels that will be induced by the existing railway infrastructure to the studied building. In the present work, this methodology is theoretically defined and it is numerically validated for two-dimensional and two-and-a-half-dimensional cases. To numerically test the methodology, the measured ground surface responses are replaced by simulated ones obtained in a set of points called collocation points. In this context, a parametric study has been developed with the aim of finding out a robust criterion for the application of the present methodology with respect to the amount and location of the collocation points (representing vibration sensors) and virtual forces. It is found that the distance between virtual sources should be smaller than the S-wave wavelength of the upper soil layer corresponding to the highest frequency of the frequency range of interest to ensure the reliability of the methodology. Moreover, the proposed method is found to be insignificantly affected by the building-tunnel dynamic coupling for building-tunnel distances above 20 m. The proposed hybrid model would simplify the usual numerical prediction approach commonly ado
This work was financially supported by: • Base Funding - UIDB/04708/2020 and Programmatic Funding - UIDP/04708/2020 of the CONSTRUCT - Instituto de I&D em Estruturas e Construç˜oes - funded by national funds through the FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) and by “Institute for sustainability and innovation in structural engineering” - ISISE (UIDP/04029/2020), funded by the Fundaç˜ao para a Ciˆencia e a Tecnologia (FCT), I.P., and Regional Operational Programme CENTRO2020 within the scope of project CENTRO-01- 0145-FEDER-000006. • The project NVTRail: Noise and Vibrations induced by railway traffic in tunnels: an integrated approach, funded by FEDER funds through COMPETE2020 and by national funds (PIDDAC) through FCT/ MCTES, with grant reference POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029577. • The project VIBWAY: Fast computational tool for railway-induced vibrations and re-radiated noise assessment, with reference RTI2018- 096819-B-I00, supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Retos de Investigación 2018. This work was partially carried out under the framework of In2Track2, a research project of Shift2Rail (H2020). The financial support provided by University of Leeds Cheney Award Scheme is also appreciated
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