Utilization of Horizontally Buried Hollow Pipes for Ground Vibration Mitigation in Public Transport Infrastructure: Innovative Technique

Ground vibrations initiated by the passage of vehicles in public transport infrastructure including railways and highways are likely to produce an adverse influence on adjacent structures. Under extreme conditions, this is likely to introduce disastrous consequences. While mitigation of these vibrations is a challenge to geotechnical engineers, adoption of open trenches besides the transport corridors is one of the widely used techniques followed in last few decades. However, it was reported that such techniques initiated several critical problems mostly relevant to the stability problem of those trenches. In this paper, a new technique is proposed for ground vibration mitigation where the open trench is filled with hollow pipes. A two-dimensional (2D) finite-element model is developed and validated to analyze the efficiency of this new technique in ground vibration isolation. The influence of various critical geometric parameters, including the underground water table and elastic modulus of soils, are studied in detail. In addition, the influences of different frequency harmonic load and measured load on the ground vibration reduction by hollow pipes are investigated. Furthermore, a three-dimensional (3D) finite-element model is developed to carry out a comparative study with the 2D modeling. This 3D modeling was applied analyzing the vibration isolation trench with other configurations including different locations of hollow pipes and moving load on the ground vibration isolation. It is observed that the proposed method is not only potentially viable in mitigation of subsurface vibration but also worthwhile for eliminating stability problems in open trenches. The detailed description of the studies conducted has been presented in this paper.