Stiffness is one of the basic performance parameters for railway track. The efficient and accurate stiffness measurement has been considered as the foundation for further development of railway engineering, and therefore has great theoretical and practical significance. Based on a summary of the connotation and measurement of track stiffness, the state of the art of measurement methods for track stiffness was analyzed systematically. The standstill measurement of track stiffness can be performed with the traditional jack-loading method, impact hammer method, FWD (falling weight deflectometer) method, and track loading vehicle method. Although these methods can be adopted in stiffness measurement for a section of railway track, they are not desirable owning to small range and low efficiency. In the recent 20 years, researchers have proposed many methods like unbalanced-loading laser displacement method, deflection basin deformation rate method, and eccentricity excitation method to continuously measure track stiffness; however, these methods have drawbacks like poor accuracy, low speed, and insufficient data analysis. In this work, the merits and demerits of these methods were summarized, and optimization suggestions were presented. Based on the wave transmission mechanism and principle of vibration energy harvesting, an overall conception on continuous measurement of stiffness and long-term stiffness monitoring for special sections was proposed.

The debonding of cement emulsified asphalt mortar (CA mortar) is one of the main damage types in China railway track system II slab ballastless track. In order to analyze the influence of mortar debonding on the dynamic properties of CRTS II slab ballastless track, a vertical coupling vibration model for a vehicle-track-subgrade system was established on the base of wheel/rail coupling dynamics theory. The effects of different debonding lengths on dynamic response of vehicle and track system were analyzed by using the finite element software. The results show that the debonding of CA mortar layer will increase the dynamic response of track. If the length of debonding exceeds 1.95 m, the inflection point will appear on the vertical displacement curve of track. The vertical vibration acceleration of slab increases 4.95 times and the vertical dynamic compressive stress of CA mortar near the debonding region increases 15 times when the debonding length reaches 3.9 m. Considering the durability of ballastless track, once the length of debonding reaches 1.95 m, the mortar debonding should be repaired.

The turnout causes significant vibrations of the wheel-rail system. In this study, based on the modal superposition method and finite element method, the flexibility of wheelsets and turnouts is considered respectively, and the vehicle-turnout coupled dynamic model is established. The swept-frequency analysis is adopted to capture the natural frequencies of wheelsets and turnouts. The dynamic interaction and modal resonance performance of the wheel-rail system are investigated when the vehicle passes through the turnout. Results indicate that during the wheel load transition in the crossing, the major frequency bands of the vertical wheel-rail impact force are related to natural frequencies of the crossing. Due to the wheelset resonant modes, the vertical impact force decreases by 12% in the through route and increases by 10% in the diverging route. The wheelset flexibility affects the wheel-rail creepage and decreases the longitudinal wheel-rail force. The wheel-rail impact force has nearly converged as the cut-off frequency of wheelsets reaches 500 Hz. The dominant frequencies of axle-box and rails’ vibrations correspond to the modal resonance between the bending modes of wheelsets and the crossing in the vertical direction, as well as, the wheelset's umbrella mode and the crossing's pinned-pinned mode in the lateral direction.

In this work, a new method has been proposed to accurately determine longitudinal force measurement in continuous welded rail (CWR) with bi-directional fiber Bragg grating (B-FBGs) strain sensors (vertically and longitudinally installed according to the axis of rail). The response of B-FBGs has been theoretically analyzed by binding on CWR under different restrained conditions, where the coefficient of strain sensitivity of FBG is calibrated by its temperature sensitivity. Then the proposed sensor structure has been installed at two elaborately selected points on the subgrade on a Chinese high-speed railway in field. The experiment lasts for about 23 h. During the experiment, the rail temperature varied by about 7.8 °C and the differentials of relative value of wavelength change of B-FBGs of two points were 1.7850 × 10⁻⁵ and 1.4969 × 10⁻⁵. The maximum difference between the experimental and theoretical results is 13.8 kN. The experimental results agree with the theoretical analysis very well. To guarantee the measurement accuracy of over 95%, the ratio of strain sensitivity coefficients of two FBG sensors of B-FBGs structure at one test point shall be within 0.78 ~ 1.22.