ABSTRACT
Construction of new railway lines in urban areas and resulting train-induced ground vibrations are of growing concern especially in the countries having limited area of land. This problem has been magnified with the dramatic need for faster and heavier trains which can produce excessive vibrations in the ground, annoy the surrounding inhabitants, and disturb sensitive equipments. Hence, care should be taken in planning new railway lines, and appropriate countermeasures should be applied to mitigate the vibration amplitudes. Zerwer et al. (2002) employed ABAQUS in finite element modeling of Rayleigh waves and notified the importance of proper mesh dimensions and damping characteristics in the finite element simulation. They presented equations to calculate the linear Rayleigh damping coefficients (average) with minimum variance within the frequency bandwidth of interest. Hall (2003) also applied the ABAQUS in the numerical modeling of train-induced ground vibration studies and reported an acceptable agreement between the numerical simulation and the field measurements. However, few works have been carried out to further verify the numerical results using geotechnical centrifuge tests.
