Abstract
The European Union is committed to encourage the most efficient transport modes such as rail and tram. However, railway tracks are a significant source of vibrations which propagate through the ground to the nearby buildings.One of the most common ways to mitigate vibration is using resilient materials (rubber plates) placed between the different elements of the track(e.g. between rail and sleeper). As a solution, this research aims to study the use and evaluation of a waste material to build the core of the embankments, formed by a mixture of soil with scrap tyres. Importantly, this mixture does not need any binder, consisting of a heterogeneous mixture made of two materials for the construction of embankments. This mixture gives improved resilient properties, and is suitable for use in railway superstructure. Furthermore, when the railway line crosses places with soils considered unsuitable as fill material embankment due to its expansive properties, the mixture solution decreases the swell potential. Thus, the construction costs are reduced because it is not necessary to bring suitable soils from other faraway places. The main objective of this project is to obtain the geomechanical properties of mixtures to validate their feasibility as materials forhighway and railway core embankments. For this purpose, different series of tests on mixtures with different percentages of addition have been carried out. On the one hand, the results in soil-mixtures show that adding up to10% rubber (in weight) the swelling potential, compression index and angle friction are improved, and other parameters such as unconfined compressive strength are reduced, but still well over the threshold and limits specified in the technical normative. On the other hand, the results obtained from unbound granular mixtures show that the rubber content should be limited to 5% or less according to resilient modulus criteria.
