TY - JOUR A1 - Auersch, Lutz A1 - Said, Samir T1 - Methods and phenomena of single and coupled floor vibrations - Measurements in apartment and office buildings N2 - A survey of the phenomena and methods for floor vibrations is presented. Experimental results of floor vibrations are shown for many floors in six different buildings. The signals have been evaluated for waves and modes by simple procedures. General rules have been established between the material and the area of a specific floor, and its local eigenfrequency. The damping values of the floor vibrations have been found between D = 1 and 10 % where somewhat higher values have been measured for wooden floors, and a weak correlation with the eigenfrequency has been established. The velocities of bending waves propagating in a storey and the attenuation with distance in the building have been analysed. A considerable transfer of vibration from one room to far away parts of the building has been found in the studied buildings with concrete and wooden floors. An example building has been analysed for modes of coupled floor bays. The strong coupling of similar neighbouring floor bays would yield a wide band of global resonance frequencies. The measured wooden floor exhibits a weak coupling of the neighbouring floor bays and a narrower band of eigenfrequencies. A special method has been tested with the impulse measurements to estimate the coupled eigenmodes in presence of the high damping. From the ambient measurement, a low-frequency vibration mode has been detected which includes the vibration of the whole building and the soil. The coupling of floors to other floors and the whole building is an important phenomenon of structural dynamics which should be observed for the prediction of vibration due to internal and external sources. PY - 2015 SN - 1351-010X VL - 22 IS - 2 SP - 81 EP - 108 PB - Multi-Science Publ. Co. CY - Brentwood AN - OPUS4-34839 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Auersch, Lutz T1 - Excitation of ground vibration due to the passage of trains over a track with trackbed irregularities and a varying support stiffness N2 - Train-induced ground vibration can be excited by wheel and track irregularities and by two kinds of irregularities of the soil, by geometric irregularities or by the spatially varying soil stiffness. For both types of irregularities, the effective track irregularity on top of the track is calculated in wavenumber domain and with wavenumber integrals. For a general multi-beam track model, the wavenumber integrals are solved numerically. The irregularities of the soil are filtered by the track when transferred from the bottom to the top of the track. The high-wavenumber irregularities are strongly reduced due to the bending stiffness of the track and the compliance of the support. In addition, soft track elements reduce directly the stiffness variation of the support. Therefore, the mitigation effect of elastic track elements for these excitation components seems to be important. For under-sleeper pads and slab tracks, calculation and measurements are presented including additional excitation components and the dynamic vehicle–track interaction, and the relevance of the excitation mechanisms is discussed based on the dynamic forces which are acting on the ground. Due to the restricted amplitudes, the parametric excitation by the stiffness variation seems to be less important than the geometric irregularities. The calculations yield the correct trends of the measurements and many details of the measured ballast, slab, and under-sleeper-pad tracks. KW - Varying track stiffness KW - Geometric trackbed irregularities KW - Multi-beam-on-support model KW - Elastic track elements KW - Parametric excitation PY - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00423114.2014.968173 SN - 0042-3114 VL - 53 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 29 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - Basingstoke, Hants. AN - OPUS4-33032 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Auersch, Lutz T1 - Realistic axle-load spectra from ground vibrations measured near railway lines N2 - Train-induced ground vibrations are generated by static and dynamic axle loads which can be calculated by vehicle-track-soil models and the vehicle and track irregularities. A fast prediction method has been developed which uses approximate transfer functions of layered soils. In the present contribution, this prediction method is used for the inverse calculation of the axle-load spectra from the measured ground vibration. The layered soils of some measuring sites show very differing ground vibration spectra in the amplitude range of 0.0001–1.0 mm/s as a consequence of the soft layer and stiff half-space, differing layer frequencies, as well as the far- and near-field measuring points. The back-calculation, however, yields axle-load spectra within a single order of magnitude around 1 kN. Axle-box measurements confirm the amplitude level of the axle loads. This standard axle-load spectrum can be used for a basic prediction at a new site. The separation of train and site-specific components allows a better evaluation of railway vibrations, for example, of different trains and different tracks. By eliminating the effects of differing soil characteristics, an important mid-frequency component has been found which lies between 8 and 32 Hz depending on the train speed. The origin of this dominant mid-frequency component is discussed using advanced prediction methods like moving constant loads, scattered axle impulses and axle-sequence spectra. PY - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2015.1076624 SN - 2324-8378 VL - 3 IS - 4 SP - 180 EP - 200 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - Abingdon AN - OPUS4-34768 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Auersch, Lutz T1 - Force and ground vibration reduction of railway tracks with elastic elements N2 - The reduction of train-induced ground vibration by elastic elements such as rail pads and sleeper pads has been analyzed by a combined finite-element boundary-element method. The dynamic compliance of the track, the transfer function of the total force on the ground and the ground vibration ratios have been calculated for a variety of isolated and un-isolated track systems. It has been found that the soil force transfer, which describes the excitation force of the soil, is an appropriate quantity to predict the reduction of the ground vibration and the effectiveness of isolated tracks. All force transfer functions of isolated tracks display a vehicle–track resonance where the wheelset on the compliant track is excited by wheel and track irregularities. At higher frequencies, considerable reductions of the amplitudes are observed as the benefit of the resilient element. The influence of the stiffness of the rail or sleeper pads, the ballast and the soil, and the mass of the sleeper and the wheelset on the resonance frequency and the reduction has been investigated. Sleeper pads are advantageous due to the higher mass that is elastically supported compared to the rail-pad track system. The combination of elastic rail and sleeper pads has been found to be disadvantageous, as the second resonance occurs in the frequency range of intended reduction. KW - Railway KW - Track KW - Rail pad KW - Sleeper pad KW - Force transfer KW - Ground vibration KW - Reduction PY - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1077546313507099 SN - 1077-5463 SN - 1741-2986 VL - 21 IS - 11 SP - 2246 EP - 2258 PB - Sage Science Press CY - Thousand Oaks, CA, USA AN - OPUS4-33682 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Auersch, Lutz A1 - Said, Samir T1 - Comparison of different dispersion evaluation methods and a case history with the inversion to a soil model, related admittance functions, and the prediction of train-induced ground vibration N2 - Ground vibrations due to different technical sources are analysed in theory and experiment for the dispersion of Rayleigh waves and the admittance spectra. Both tasks are theoretically based on the same concept: The admittance function in frequency–wavenumber domain yields the dispersion as its maxima, and the admittance function in space domain is obtained by integrating it over the wavenumbers. On the experimental side, many signal processing methods have been applied to many sites and have been developed by the authors in the last 35 years, i.e., time-domain methods, including the cross-correlation method, and frequency-domain methods such as the spectral analysis of surface waves with two or multiple sensors, the wavenumber-transform method, and the spatial autocorrelation method. All methods are presented by their basic formula and by at least one example site. Different sensor arrays and deterministic and stochastic sources have been tested for the spatial autocorrelation method and the wavenumber-transform method at several sites. In addition, all frequency-domain methods are presented for a specific layered site comparing their quality. The evaluated dispersion curves are very similar, but a somewhat higher frequency range has been found for the fastest method, i.e., the multi-sensor spectral-analysis-of-surface-waves method. The theoretical solutions have been used for the inversion of the measured dispersion to the soil profile of the specific layered soil. The theoretical soil model has subsequently been used to predict the ground vibration spectra of hammer and railway excitation that exhibit a good agreement with the corresponding measurements. Thus, the contribution shows the benefit of active and passive seismic methods for the prediction of railway vibration, including a new version of the spatial autocorrelation method for technical vibrations. On the other hand, technical and namely railway vibrations are considered a seismic source for the exploration of near surface soils. PY - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3997/1873-0604.2015011 SN - 1569-4445 VL - 13 IS - 2 SP - 127 EP - 142 PB - EAGE - European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers CY - Houten AN - OPUS4-33836 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rogge, Andreas A1 - Auersch, Lutz T1 - Innovation in track components: heavy sleepers on soft under-sleeper pads N2 - The maintenance of the transport infrastructures and their further development are going to remain focal points for investment and research in Germany in future. According to the latest development forecasts made by both the federal government and Deutsche Bahn, even if rail´s percentage share of the market were to remain unchanged, growth of around 50% would be expected in the next ten years, especially in freight traffic. This growth is necessitating considerable development both in the technical design of the tracks and in the abatement of the noise and vibration caused by railway traffic. PY - 2015 SN - 0013-2845 VL - 2 SP - 9 EP - 13 PB - DVV Media Group, Eurailpress CY - Hamburg AN - OPUS4-34993 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -