Assessment and mitigation of railway-induced environmental vibrations over underground comprehensive transportation hub

Abstract

With the development of railway networks, a new infrastructure integrating the underground comprehensive transportation hub and building complex (UCTH&BC) is constructed in many metropolitan cities. However, there is no relevant research to analyse its railway-induced environmental vibrations and propose an appropriate mitigation measure for such a large structure. To have a comprehensive assessment and satisfying control of the potential environmental vibration problem during the life-cycle of UCTH&BC, a numerical study of a newly-built UCTH&BC was carried out through a time-frequency method based on transfer function theory. The ground and building vibrations were firstly evaluated to have a better understanding of vibration transmission and distribution characteristics. Furthermore, rubber mat floating slab tracks (RMFST) were optimised to propose a suitable mitigation measure. Results show that if adopting ordinary track structures, the ground vibrations in the regions where train-induced vibrations transmit directly through columns exceeded the standard limit seriously by more than 5 dB, while the nearby building vibrations were acceptable. The RMFST with the stiffness of 0.011 N/mm³ was recommended to efficiently reduce vibrations by more than 10 dB, ensuring environmental vibrations in the UCTH&BC satisfy the relevant standard requirement and provide a sufficient safety margin to deal with worse track conditions.

Keywords:

• Environmental vibration
• floating slab track
• numerical analysis
• tall building
• underground structure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was sponsored by the Beijing Nova Program (Z191100001119126), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2020JBM049), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51827813) and the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rail Infrastructure Durability and System Safety (R202101).