Non-Destructive Technologies for a Sustainable Assessment and Monitoring of Railway Infrastructures: A Focus on GPR and InSAR Methods

Abstract

Health monitoring of ballast in railway infrastructures is crucial to assure structural stability and efficiency of the operations. To this extent, an efficient and sustainable management of maintenance is fundamental for asset managers in setting up strategic and effective action plans. Amongst the available methods to assess the conditions of railway infrastructures, non-destructive technologies (NDT) are gaining popularity due to their capability to overcome main drawbacks of traditional routine methods, such as digging trenches and visually inspect locations assumed as critical along the track. The present paper presents an overview of the use of the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture (InSAR) technologies for a sustainable monitoring of railway infrastructures. Specifically, main traditional and non-destructive methods used for maintenance of railway ballast materials are presented with a special focus on their sustainability. A review about the research methods on the use of GPR and InSAR technologies for railway infrastructures also reported, including main investigations carried out in the laboratory and the real-life environments. Furthermore, a conceptual framework based on an integrated approach including satellite-based and ground-based investigations is proposed, where network and local level information can be merged for the detection of critical sections and the implementation of a more advanced predictive maintenance system.

Quantification of the Mechanized Ballast Cleaning Process Efficiency Using GPR Technology

“…Fontul et al [57] expressed seismic waves, GPR, electric resistivity, and gravimetry as the fundamental NDT geophysical methods for railway infrastructure assessment. Comprehensive overviews on the GPR-based applications for condition monitoring of railway ballast can be found in a couple of works [10,58,59].…”