Engineering Commons^™

Investigation Of Ballast Degradation And Fouling Trends Using Image Analysis, M. Moaveni, Y. Qian, H. Boler, D. Mishra, E. Tutumluer

Debakanta Mishra

Ballast fouling, often associated with deteriorating railroad track performance, refers to the condition when the ballast layer changes its composition and becomes much finer in grain size distribution. This paper describes an image analysis approach to characterize different stages of railroad ballast degradation studied using Los Angeles abrasion testing in the laboratory. An aggregate image analysis approach is utilized to investigate ballast particle abrasion and breakage trends at every stage through detailed quantifications of individual ballast particle size and shape properties. Aggregate image processing or segmentation techniques have been also developed and used in this study to analyze the two-dimensional …