Numerical Study of the Humped Slab Track Behavior in SandStorm by Modeling Two-Phase Flow

Every year, Sandstorm creates many problems in the railway lines in Iran with lots of maintainace cost so it is important to provide a complete and appropriate solution for this problem. Humped slab track is a way to prevent sand accumulation on the track. In this paper simulation of sandstorm to obtain sand accumulation across the rails is done in a three-dimensional model. The railroad track section is modeled with 4 rows of humped traverses. The input flow of air and sand is simulated with homogeneous two-phase of gas-solid using Eulerain approach by STAR-CCM+ software. The sand grains with 125, 250 and 500 microns in diameter are applied based on the distribution of grains in the desert of Iran. Also, with different wind velocities, the suspention velocity of particles with different diameters is investigated. In the following, the elevation of the humps of the traverses is investigated with three heights of 10,15 and 20 centimeters. The simulation results in this paper show that the larger the diameter of the particles may lead to less particle suspention and more sands accumulation behind the humps and increase of track blockage. This study also shows that using humped slab track can be efficient at storms above 20 m/s and at the lower values, the accumulation of sand is still seen on the line.