Study of the barriers for the mitigation of railway vibration

The reduction of environmental interference caused by the passage of railway convoys at high speed, in recent years, has become a key element for optimization and approval of the design alternatives. Therefore the need to develop models which analyze the effects of the vibrations induced on buildings close to rail lines appears primary, in order to define and classify possible improvement choices. In this paper we analyze the problem of the propagation of vibrations in the ground and focus the attention on the dampening effect of a barrier placed between source and receiver, in particular, we model the phenomenon through the finite element method considering the presence in the ground of one or several discontinuities. A parametric study to investigate the importance of the position, for example, of the discontinuity, introduced by the membrane is performed; then, different numerical simulations are analyzed by changing the position, the dimension and the materials of the barrier in order to optimize the FE model in terms of stress agents on the foundations and to study how the wave propagation and the soil-structure interaction are influenced by the membrane which can be seen as a damping barrier.