Abstract
In recent years, owing to heavy or intense rainfalls, railway tracks have been damaged in Japan. Some involves the cases where railroad ballast beds were washed away. Thus, accurate prediction methods and efficient countermeasures against the ballast flow-outs are now required. Therefore, in this study, to focus the railroad ballast bed flow-outs under inundation flow, simulations of ballast bed slope collapse were carried out using SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) method. The simulation considered the progressive slope failure and seepage characteristics observed in model experiments. The seepage characteristics of the ballast beds were expressed by introducing the Forchheimer law into the SPH simulation. The progressive slope failure process involved the slip-out of several ballast particles. The slip-out was reproduced in the SPH simulation by considering critical pore water velocities which could be obtained by a micro-mechanic model.
