Automated Measurement of Railway Ballast Angularity
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 18, Issue 4
Abstract
Recent research achieved on recycled railway ballasts issued that they were not properly assessed using European standard test methods. Indeed, other characteristics such as wear stage of particles have to be checked to assess their resistance to tracks vertical deformations. This paper introduces a new image processing based method and angularity criteria for the characterization of railway ballast wear stage. They have been implemented into the VDG40 videograder. Experimental design technique has been used to validate the method and criteria and to set up an efficient test procedure. Samples have been artificially worn away using a milling device. Then the wear stage of each sample was determined using the test procedure. Two main conclusions were drawn: first, two rock types showed similar angularity evolution with respect to wear stage, which puts the question whether they would resist similarly to tracks vertical deformation and second, this evolution is nonlinear.
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Acknowledgments
The writers wish to thank the technicians who have made this study possible, namely Mr. Christophe ANTOINE and his colleagues from the Laboratoire Régional des Ponts et Chaussées d’Autun (France), also their colleagues from CECP and LCPC’s aggregate team for their assistance and support.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 18 • Issue 4 • August 2006
Pages: 612 - 618
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 14, 2003
Accepted: Aug 10, 2005
Published online: Aug 1, 2006
Published in print: Aug 2006
Notes
Note. Associate Editor: Kamran M. Nemati
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