DEM Analysis of Mechanical Behaviors of Railway Ballast

The ballasted railway track, as one of the most important ways of transportation, has a wide distribution in China. The main functions of the railway structure are to withstand and transfer the load from the sleeper, to maintain the stability of the track geometry, and to mitigate and absorb the impact and vibration from the wheel-rail interaction. As a kind of typical granular materials, railway ballast exhibits strong nonlinear properties such as non-uniformity, discontinuity and anisotropy.