| Summary: |
Requirements set by high-speed railways (HSR), ranging from safety aspects to the construction solutions, offer the engineering community a new set of challenges that need to be addressed urgently.
Although there is currently a significant experience with the use of prefabricated construction solutions for conventional railroads, its use in HSR has been considerably scarce. Parallel to the development of innovating systems showing to be more suitable to this new reality, the development of studies addressing the adequacy of existing structural systems to the new, and more stringent, requirements of HSR is one of the current challenges that are facing the national and international technical and scientific community.
In the field of the current project, the following four activity threads are identified:
A) Development of integrated prefabricated bridge solutions for HSR, bearing in mind the following aspects: minimization of the transition problem; efficient dynamic behaviour; adequate seismic behaviour, for low levels of ground shaking as well as for the design earthquake level; adequate behaviour of the connection zones linking the prefabricated components.
B) Behaviour assessment and definition of new solutions for the transition zones of underpasses made out of prefabricated components, in order to enhance their safety, for both service and ultimate limit state conditions, and their maintenance.
C) Definition of new solutions for prefabricated noise barriers in the vicinity of HSR exhibiting adequate acoustic and structural behaviour, avoiding the excessive deformation that has been observed in conventional solutions.
D) Definition of new solutions for HSR track slabs using prefabricated slabs with an optimized cross section, accounting for the type of traffic, the optimization of materials, the construction process, the type of joints and dynamic behaviour. |