Vibration Mitigation Effect Investigation of a New Slab Track Plate Design

This study proposed a novel vibration mitigation slab track plate design to mitigate the vibration induced in urban rail transit operations. The optimal recipe for the newly designed slab track plate is obtained by a series of laboratory tests, and both newly designed vibration mitigation slab track plates and normal slab track plates are fabricated and hereinafter tested. The newly designed slab track plate was examined with a series of laboratory tests in comparison with the normal slab track plate. The PolyMAX method is then adopted for extracting the modal properties, including resonant frequencies, and damping ratios are also determined for both the designed slab and normal slab track plates. A vibration mitigation level (Ls) is defined to address the vibration mitigation performance taking the acceleration response of the normal slab track plate as reference. The newly designed slab track plate demonstrated better dynamic and damping characteristics in comparison with the normal slab track plate. Under the same excitation force, the newly designed slab track plate can mitigate 8.9 dB on average in the frequency range [20, 400] Hz, expressing the feasibility of effective vibration mitigation capacity.