High-speed Railway Geotechnical Problems
Distinguished Professor Daichao Sheng
The QLD state government is currently evaluating fast and high-speed railways within the SEQ Region, with one eye on the infrastructure being in place for the proposed 2032 Olympics. As per NSW assessments, the short to medium-term focus is the upgrade and optimising existing routes for inter-regional transport – which would be expected to include target train speed of 200 km/hour. In the medium to long-term, new routes would include alignments and rollingstock that would allow train speeds of over 250 km/hour. While it might be cost-effective and viable for Australia to import all transport components such as vehicles and control systems, we have to accommodate our ground conditions on which the high-speed railways are built. In this regards, geotechnical issues represent the key technical challenges for building high-speed railways in Australia. This talk presents some overseas perspectives of high-speed railway geotechnics, including some unique geotechnical problems like ground vibration and critical train speed, mud pumping and embankment degradation and cold region geotechnics.
About the speaker
Distinguished Professor Daichao Sheng Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and the Head of School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Technology Sydney
Daichao Sheng is a Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and the Head of School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) since 2019. Before his current role, he was a Professor of Geomechanics at the University of Newcastle during 1997-2019. His research interest spans computational geomechanics, unsaturated soils, transport geotechnics and environmental geotechnics. His involvement with high-speed railway stems from his conjoint position at the National Engineering Laboratory for High-Speed Railway Construction in China.
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