ABSTRACT
In ballasted rail track repetitive rail loading degrades the ballast over time. The degradation of ballast mostly occurs through particle fragmentation followed by segregation of the ballast. Due to such particle fragmentation, the performance of railway track deteriorates and it causes serious problems like ballast fouling, also it affects greatly the engineering properties of the ballast layer. In the present study, we theoretically quantify the amount of particle crushing in the ballast layer under cyclic loading. A thermodynamically consistent hypo-plastic framework is used in this study to estimate the ballast crushing under cyclic loading. The proposed hypo-plastic framework is found to be a simple alternative over other classical kinematic hardening based models for the simulation of granular materials performance under cyclic loading. The model predictions on ballast degradation under monotonic and cyclic loading are found to be well agreeable with the experimental data available in the literature.
