Geodynamics of high-speed railway

High-speed railway is one kind of important transportation infrastructures developed in many countries worldwide, and it has significant benefits on both economic development and social progress. The most obvious feature distinguishing the high-speed railway from the conventional railway is its high train operation speed, and this leads to strict standards to control railway vibration as well as settlement in design and operations. Geodynamics of high-speed railway becomes an interdisciplinary field of railway engineering, geotechnical engineering, structural dynamics, and has been a hot topic with the dramatic development of high-speed railways world widely. This paper summarizes the recent research advances on geodynamic issues on the high-speed railway, focusing on the theoretical modeling of track-substructure dynamic interaction and consequent wave propagation in soils, distribution of dynamic soil stresses in the soils under track structure and the dynamic amplification as train speed increases, as well as the prediction methods of subgrade accumulative settlement caused by train operations. Finally, some prospective are put forward on the studies on geodynamics of high-speed railways.