The scope of this research is to provide an improved procedure for track railways monitoring, which should be an alternative to the one commonly used in Portugal and in others European countries.
The traditionally approach for track maintenance corrects the track geometry withouth finding out the causes of geometric defects, namely the ones related with the foundation condition. The methodology proposed in this research aims to determining the real causes of track degradation through the application of a non-destructive equipment, the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR).
The GPR is widely used for road applications while for railways applications it is still under development. Among its advantages, it enables performing measurements in a continuous way, reducing traffic interruptions, and it allows for subsurface layers characterisation in terms of layers thicknesses. On the other hand, as its application is still quite recent in this field, special care is still needed before, during and after tests performance.
In particular, for GPR data intepretation, a calibration study for track materials characterisation is always needed. In situ test pits and laboratory tests are performed and presented in this thesis.
The proposed methodology consists in correlating track geometric parameters with GPR data. It intends to provide an efficient tool for supporting maintenance decisions at network level. In this way, it aims to contribute for the identification of crtical areas and for prediction of track defects, in a more efficient way comparing to the methodology currently performed
