State of the Art: Deterioration Models of Railway Ballasts and Subgrades. Recommendations and Applications

The need to build efficiently and sustainably in recent years has changed the trends in the design and exploitation of infrastructure, which is essential for the social and economic development of each country. This change is being seen more frequently in the field of transportation infrastructure and other types of construction of special interest, since it is important to know the long-term behavior and deterioration of certain materials to verify their functionality and security. The study of behavior and deterioration over time is motivating the development of new and innovative design methodologies that evolve from purely numerical methods that allow us to predict the long-term response to new experimental work that serves as a guide and reference in this engineering field. This review of the state of the art shows a set of deterioration models, collected in the literature, that quantify the deterioration of materials, with special interest in the railway field. These models have been classified and analyzed according to criteria that may be useful for railway infrastructure designers.

Keywords: Long-term settlements; Finite element method; Cyclic behavior; Deterioration; Permanent strain; Prediction models