ABSTRACT
Underground railway lines generate a large amount of ground-borne vibrations, which has negative effects to the inhabitants and structures nearby. However, due to the large number of variables affecting the generation and propagation of vibrations, numerically predicting these effects is a complex task. When accounting for all factors, the numerical models become complicated to produce and take long time to compute. Alternatively, severely simplified models do not provide satisfactory precision. The aim of the paper is identification of the most important factors when modelling the propagation of vibrations from railway tunnels. Identifying the most important parameters allows creation of computational models that account for the most significant phenomena, while reducing the computational complexity as much as possible. For this task a number of different embedded railway tunnel models are created. To account for soil-tunnel interactions a semi-analytical soil model is used, which is based on the transfer matrix method. The tunnel structure is modelled using finite elements which are coupled to the semi-analytical soil solution, thus achieving a fully coupled structure–soil model.
