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Prediction of Railway-Induced Ground Vibrations in Tunnels: Carlo G. Lai
Prediction of Railway-Induced Ground Vibrations in Tunnels: Carlo G. Lai
Lai1
European Centre for Training and Research in
Earthquake Engineering (EUCENTRE) c/o
Universit degli Studi di Pavia,
Via Ferrata 1,
Pavia, 27100, Italy
e-mail: carlo.lai@eucentre.it
Alberto Callerio
Studio Geotecnico Italiano SrL,
Via Ripamonti 89,
Milano, 20139, Italy
e-mail: sgi_callerio@studio-geotecnico.it
Ezio Faccioli
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Strutturale,
Politecnico di Milano,
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32,
Milano, 20133, Italy
e-mail: faccioli@stru.polimi.it
Vittorio Morelli
e-mail: v.morelli@mail.italferr.it
Pietro Romani
e-mail: p.romani@mail.italferr.it
Italferr SpA,
Via Marsala 53,
Roma, 00185, Italy
Prediction of Railway-Induced
Ground Vibrations in Tunnels
The authors of this paper present the results of a study concerned with the assessment of
the vibrational impact induced by the passage of commuter trains running in a tunnel
placed underground the city of Rome. Since the railway line is not yet operational, it was
not possible to make a direct measurement of the ground vibrations induced by the
railway traffic and the only way to make predictions was by means of numerical simulations. The numerical model developed for the analyses was calibrated using the results
of a vibration measurement campaign purposely performed at the site using as a vibration source a sinusoidal vibration exciter operating in a frequency-controlled mode. The
problem of modeling the vibrational impact induced by the passage of a train moving in
a tunnel is rather complex because it requires the solution of a boundary value problem
of three-dimensional elastodynamics in a generally heterogeneous, nonsimply connected
continuum with a moving source. The subject is further complicated by the difficulties of
modeling the source mechanism, which constitutes itself a challenge even in the case of
railway lines running at the surface. At last, the assessment of the vibrational impact at
a receiver placed inside a building (e.g., a human individual or a sensitive instrument)
requires an evaluation of the role played by the structure in modifying the computed
free-field ground motion. So far, few attempts have been made to model the whole vibration chain (from the source to the receiver) of railway-induced ground vibrations, with
results that have been only moderately successful. The numerical simulations performed
in this study were made by using a simplified numerical model aimed to capture the
essence of the physical phenomena involved in the above vibration chain including the
influence of the structural response as well as the dependence of the predicted vibration
spectra on the train speed. DOI: 10.1115/1.2013300
Keywords: Ground-Borne Vibrations, Railways, Trains, Tunnels, Vibration Modeling,
Moving Train
Introduction
Modeling the impact of railway-induced ground vibrations constitutes a rather difficult problem whose solution requires, as a
minimum, that the following subproblems be properly addressed
and solved see Fig. 1:
1. The source problem connected to the definition of the physical mechanisms responsible for the generation of the
railway-induced ground vibrations.
2. The propagation problem connected to the transmission of
the ground-borne vibrations from the source to the receiver
under free-field conditions.
3. The structural response problem connected to the evaluation
of the role played by the structure in affecting the vibration
level at the receiver, e.g., a human individual or a sensitive
instrument, located inside a building.
This decomposition of the vibration-modeling problem has only a
formal significance since the solution of each of the above subproblems is not independent from the others. However, mimicking
an approach commonly used in engineering seismology, the above
subdivision is instructive because it helps to enlighten the peculiar
aspects in which can be decomposed the overall problem.
Unfortunately a numerical model that solves rigorously each of
the above subproblems is still lacking. To date most of the studies
1
Corresponding author. Formerly at Studio Geotecnico Italiano SrL, Via Ripamonti 89, Milano, 20139 Italy.
Contributed by the Technical Committee on Vibration and Sound for publication
in the JOURNAL OF VIBRATION AND ACOUSTICS. Manuscript received October 11, 2003.
Final revision January 6, 2005. Associate Editor: Roger Ohayon.
conducted on this topic have focused on deepening a specific aspect of the vibration chain like, for instance, the source problem,
or at most the combination of the source and the propagation
problem. The attempts to predict the vibrational response at a
receiver located inside a building have almost always been conducted using empirical or semiempirical approaches which by
their intrinsic nature suffer for a lack of generality.
In case of underground railway lines the source problem is
further complicated by the presence of the tunnel walls and of its
interaction with the track system, the moving train, and the surrounding soil see Fig. 1. Empirical or semiempirical approaches
for solving the source and propagation problems of underground
railway lines have been proposed for instance by Refs. 13.
More rigorous formulations using the finite element method have
also been carried out, see, for example, Refs. 46. In the evaluation of the vibrational response at the receiver Ref. 5 also accounted for the building dynamic response. More recently Ref. 7
developed an analytical approach for computing the surface
ground vibrations induced by a moving train in a tunnel based on
a simplified two-dimensional model.
This paper illustrates the results of a study concerned with the
evaluation of the vibrational impact induced by underground railway traffic at the receivers located inside two buildings of the city
of Rome. Since the railway line is currently not yet operational,
the prediction of the impact was made using a combination of
experimental measurements and numerical simulations. The experimental measurements were used to determine at two sections
of the tunnel, the transfer functions of the transmission chain from
the source to the receiver free field and inside the buildings see
Fig. 1. The vibration source used for the experimental measure-
Numerical Model
Fig. 2 Methodology used for the evaluation of vibrational impact from railway traffic from
13
Fig. 3 Dynamic vertical oscillator used to model the multicomponent track system modified from 12
Aa
+b
+a
Fig. 4 Loading emission spectrum adopted in the numerical modelVertical pressure at the basement of a
standard ballasted trackTrain category TAFTransit velocity: 100 Km/h from 13,12
lovs model from the researcher that in recent times has systematically used it to simulate the vibration generation mechanism of
trains running at the ground surface 8.
The procedure is formalized mathematically by a convolution
integral between the forces distributed along the track i.e., the
train loading function and the corresponding dynamic influence
function. In the frequency domain the convolution integral can be
written as follows:
aFFx,y, =
m=+
Px,y , , v =
where aFF
x , y , is the acceleration induced at the receiver free
field by the moving train along the directions = x, y, z that are,
respectively, transversal, longitudinal, and vertical to the track,
GFF
, is the dynamic influence function or transfer function
representing the acceleration generated at the ground surface at
P , ve
B
iy /v
y mdx
m=
where m denotes the dummy index for the current sleeper number
along the direction of the track, d is the distance between sleepers,
i = 1, represents the Diracs delta distribution, and
P , v is the average vertical pressure at the basement of the
B
Fig. 5 Loading emission spectrum adopted in the numerical modelVertical pressure at the basement of a
standard ballasted trackTrain category freightTransit velocity: 90 Km/h from 13,12
Fig. 6 Computation scheme adopted for determining the free-field response at the receiver
from 13
C e P
n
axis from the electrodynamic shaker, and that computed using Eq.
4. Despite the simplicity of the model used for the attenuation of
the dynamic influence function the results of the comparison are
considered satisfactory.
As a final remark of this section, it is noted that the infinite sum
appearing in Eq. 3 is formal and only a finite number of terms
need to be considered. A parametric study indicated that since the
contributions of the active sleepers in the sum decrease with m, a
suitable value for convergence is m 300.
2.3 Propagation of Ground Vibrations in the Far Field. The
vibration measurement campaign conducted in this study has
shown clear evidence that the attenuation of the vibration field
induced at the ground surface by the electrodynamic shaker is
virtually negligible up to a distance of about 20 m from the tunnel
axis for the vertical component and it is low to moderate for the
two other components. This experimental result is thought to be
caused by a geometrical effect due to the relatively low depth of
embedding of the tunnel at one measurement site of the tunnel,
the top of the tunnel cap is located about 10 m below the ground
surface if compared with the tunnel diameter.
The vertical oscillations of the electrodynamic shaker are transformed into an excitation of the tunnel cap that thus becomes
itself a large source of vibrations. The weak attenuation of the
vibration field observed experimentally at the ground surface
within a certain distance from the tunnel axis is then caused by the
propagation of vibrations radiating away from the tunnel cap
along cylindrical wave fronts. Although this phenomenon was detected using a point source, it is expected to be even more pronounced for the case of a moving train since the latter acts geometrically like a finite line source for horizontal distances that are
small when compared with the train length.
In light of these considerations, in the numerical model used for
the prediction of the vibrational impact induced at the ground
surface by the underground railway traffic, it was postulated the
existence of a near-field band across the tunnel axis where all the
three component of the wave field do not undergo any type of
spatial attenuation. The size of the near-field band was assumed to
be 20 m at each side of the tunnel axis. Outside this band, hereinafter named far field, the wave field was computed according to
the following assumptions:
1 The medium where the propagation of ground-borne vibrations takes place is weakly dissipative;
OCTOBER 2005, Vol. 127 / 507
R =
VR2
V Pi
VR
DP +
VP i i
V
i
Si
VR
DS
VS i i
Building A: residential, not recent 19561960, with concrete resisting structure moment-resisting frame, fourstories, piled-foundations;
Building B: Residential and commercial, relatively recent
19651970, with concrete resisting structure momentresisting frame, four-stories, shallow foundations.
The next two sections will describe the position where the measurements were made inside the two buildings and will illustrate
the modulus of the measured transfer functions Hj .
Journal of Vibration and Acoustics
H1 A =
H2+3A =
aS3
aS4
aS4
aS5
7
A
SK
where a is the acceleration spectrum measured at the seismometer K K = 3 , 4 , 5 along the directions = x, y, z in building
A. The modulus of the transfer function H1A is plotted in its
three components in Fig. 8. The frequency range of these plots is
between 10 and 50 Hz which coincides with the working range of
the electrodynamic shaker. As the figure clearly shows, all three
components of H1A have an irregular trend. Rapid changes
alternate to narrow spikes that may denote the existence of local
resonance phenomena. For this reason they have been smoothed
using a piece-wise straight-line approximation throughout the entire frequency range of definition using a conservative criterion.
2.4.2 Building B. The building is located in a highly populated area with only neighboring roads breaking the building continuity. The measurement devices were installed at the following
locations:
Due to unfavorable conditions at the measurement site for background noise the basement is used as a parking lot and car repairing facility, it was found convenient to measure directly the
combined effect of the three measured transfer functions Hj
j = 1 , 3 ; = x , y , z thereby obtaining
H1+2+3B =
aS3
aS5
8
B
Experimental Measurements
The testing sites were located in correspondence of two sections of the railway tunnel Cassia-Montemario in Rome, Italy.
The two sections along the tunnel, whose total length is 4381 m,
were identified as section A located at the progressive distance
24+ 035 km and section B located at the progressive distance
24+ 610 km and include the homonymous buildings selected for
the vibration measurement campaign. Figure 11 shows the location of seismometers in section A. The top of the tunnel cap is
positioned at about 6 m below the ground surface in section A and
10 m in section B.
At both sections, the measurements were made at five stations
Fig. 12 Testing site at the Cassia-Montemario underground railway line in Rome, ItalyCampbells diagrams in
Section ASeismometers S2 and S3 from 13
At the ground surface along the tunnel, the subsoil includes also a
512 / Vol. 127, OCTOBER 2005
aRCB = aFFH1+2+3B
10
aRC
A
11
The numerical simulations were conducted considering the passage of trains of categories TAF and Freight see Sec. 2 both
traveling at a speed of 100 km/h.
Figures 13 and 14 show the results obtained from the numerical
simulations for building A and B, respectively at the center of the
second floor.
The acceleration spectra are plotted as RMS root mean square
values in one-third octave frequency scale in the range 180 Hz.
Transactions of the ASME
Fig. 13 Results of numerical simulations at the CassiaMontemario underground railway line in Rome, Italy
Magnitude of acceleration spectrum in one-third octave scale
at the center of the second floor of building AComparison
with standard ISO 2631 for the evaluation of human response
to vibrations from 13
For both buildings A and B and for both categories of trains TAF
and Freight, the predicted accelerations are, at all frequencies,
below the limits for discomfort prescribed by the Standard ISO
2631-2 thin line19. However the values of aRC predicted
for the Freight train dashed line are consistently higher than
those of the TAF train bold line. Figures 13 and 14 put also in
evidence that although the depth of embedding of the tunnel in
section B is greater than in section A about 10 m against 6 m,
the acceleration values predicted by the model at building B are
higher than those of building A. This result has also been confirmed experimentally by comparing the magnitude of the transfer
functions measured with the electrodynamic shaker at sections A
and B, and it has been interpreted as the gross effect yielded in
Fig. 14 Results of numerical simulations at the CassiaMontemario underground railway line in Rome, Italy
Magnitude of acceleration spectrum in one-third octave scale
at the center of the second floor of building BComparison
with standard ISO 2631 for the evaluation of human response
to vibrations from 13
Concluding Remarks
This paper illustrated the results of a numerical model developed for the predictions of the vibrational impact induced by the
railway traffic resulting from the reactivation of the underground
railway line Cassia-Montemario in Rome, Italy. For the prediction
of the free-field ground vibration the model was calibrated using
the results of experimental measurements conducted with a electromechanical shaker.
One of the objectives of the vibration measurement campaign
was also to determine the experimental transfer functions to assess
the effects of the building dynamic response on the free-field
ground motion. Although the results of the numerical simulations
display a rather favorable vibrational scenario, a direct comparison of the predicted vibration climate with the vibration levels
measured after the reactivation of the underground railway line is
required for a definitive validation of the model.
Acknowledgments
The work of the first two authors has been sponsored by Studio
Geotecnico Italiano Srl. The support of Italferr S.p.A. which provided the experimental data is also acknowledged. Finally the
authors would like to express a special word of appreciation to
Ing. Natoni of Italferr S.p.A. for his valuable suggestions.
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