Keywords: railway transition zones, types of transition zones, embankment-bridge transition, energy based criterion, safe hull inspired energy limiting design, finite element model.

Railway transition zones are the most critical part of the railway infrastructures that experience 4-8 times more degradation compared to open tracks. Despite several attempts to reduce the maintenance and operation costs in these critical zones, a robust and comprehensive solution remains unknown. In recent studies, a robust safe hull inspired energy limiting design of a transition structure was proposed for an embankment-bridge transition (without ballast layer over the bridge) to deal with operation-induced degradation. However, this solution was investigated in detail for only this particular type of transition. In this work, the scope of this mitigation measure is extended for an embankment-bridge transition with ballast running over the bridge and its performance is evaluated using a strain-energy criterion. It was concluded in the end that the safe hull inspired energy limiting design can effectively mitigate the operation-induced dynamic amplification for more than one type of railway transition zones.

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