Structural impact response for assessing railway vibration induced on buildings

Over the syears, the rapid growth in railway infrastructure has led to numerous environmental challenges. One such significant issue, particularly in urban areas, is ground-borne vibration. A common source of ground-borne vibration is caused by local defects (e.g. rail joints, switches, turnouts, etc.) that generate large amplitude excitations at isolated locations. Modelling these excitation sources is particularly challenging and requires the use of complex and extensive computational efforts. For some situations, the use of experiments and measured data offers a rapid way to estimate the effect of such defects and to evaluate the railway vibration levels using a scoping approach. In this paper, the problem of railway-induced ground vibrations is presented along with experimental studies to assess the ground vibration and ground borne noise levels, with a particular focus on the structural response of sensitive buildings. The behaviour of particular building foundations is evaluated through experimental data collected in Brussels Region, by presenting the expected frequency responses for various types of buildings, taking into account both the soil-structure interaction and the tramway track response. A second study is dedicated to the Athens metro, where transmissibility functions are used to analyse the effect of various Athenian building face to metro network trough comprehensive measurement campaigns. This allows the verification of appropriate vibration mitigation measures. These benchmark applications based on experimental results have been proved to be efficient to treat a complex problem encountered in practice in urban areas, where the urban rail network interacts with important local defects and where the rise of railway ground vibration problems has clearly been identified.