Abstract
This paper examines the effects of particle properties such as particle shape and grain size distribution of particle assemblage on the bearing capacity of railroad ballast in numerical simulations with discontinuous analysis. Here, two evaluation indexes of particle shape, namely “angularity” and “sphericity”, were employed. To evaluate the effect quantitatively, a series of numerical simulations that regard a ballast particle as a regular or an irregular polygon were performed. As the result, it can be observed that the particle shape of numerical models, especially the angularity has a greater effect on the bearing capacity of railroad ballast than the grain size distribution, and that the imitation of the shape of real ballast particles makes numerical results similar to experimental results.
