engleski

Innovative materials for sustainable railway tracks

In the past decade, railway infrastructure experienced significant expansion. In order to assure “green” transportation, all across the world investments in railway infrastructure are present. Significant industrialization, and accordingly development of the transportation infrastructure caused serious atmospheric pollution and irretrievable degradation of living conditions. In order to stop this constantly raising pollution, most of current investments are focused on development of high speed railways as a way of sustainable transportation. Construction of such engineering structures requires special care during selection of applied materials due to presence of heavy dynamic loads and aggressive exposure conditions. At the moment the market provides track systems specially designed for high speed railways, but application of inadequate materials caused insufficient durability of these structures. In order to improve existing solutions, scientists from University of Zagreb developed innovative concrete ballastless track prototype called ECOTRACK. In its nutshell, ECOTRACK is a concrete based solution that incorporates waste materials obtained during mechanical recycling of waste tyres. Incorporation of named materials assures ECOTRACK-s alignment with all relevant EU Directives in the field of waste management on one side, and on the other improvement of toughness and post-cracking behaviour desirable for the described ballastless track systems.

waste tyres; hybrid fibre reinforced concrete; recycled steel fibres

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