El pasado 20 de septiembre de 2023 Ali Issa Abdel-Karim AlQatawna defendió su tesis doctoral titulada “Using BIM methodology for designing the alignment of highspeed railway lines aimed at mixed-speed traffic” en la E.T.S.I de Caminos, Canales y Puertos del campus de Ciudad Real. Esta tesis doctoral se ha realizado bajo la dirección del Dr. Santos Sánchez-Cambronero García-Moreno y la codirección de la Dra. María Inmaculada Gallego Giner y pertenece al Programa de Doctorado en Territorio, Infraestructuras y Medio Ambiente.
Resumen de la tesis
Maintaining the geometric quality of high-speed rail tracks is an aspect that has proven to be key to ensuring the success of this mode of transport. The reason is obvious: A rail track in perfect condition has a direct implication on the comfort of travelers and the deterioration of both the infrastructure and the rolling stock. Regarding the infrastructure, there are a wide variety of causes that lead to the deterioration of the rail track, which means that if the target is keeping the tracks in optimal conditions, the maintenance should be flawless from the very beginning. This deterioration is a function of many factors such as the heterogeneity of materials and elements with which it is designed, the quality of conservation itself, or, above all, the accumulated dynamic load that the trains exert on the rails. Although a great effort has been devoted to studying the deterioration of railways as a function of the materials that compose it or the loads they undergo, no attention has been paid to the influence of the layout on the maintenance of the geometric quality of the railway.
A possible cause may be the lack of consensus when defining the values of the geometric design parameters of the track. This has led to the situation that compliance with the current recommendations for the design of high-speed track in Spain makes it very difficult to operate freight trains, which can lead to some newly built lines being underused and therefore its profitability may be called into question. To shed light on this problem, this Thesis proposes a comprehensive design methodology for high-speed railway lines applying a BIM approach so that they consider aspects of maintenance from the geometric design phase. This methodology is applied on the Madrid - Extremadura High-Speed Line, verifying that, by changing the design parameters, it is possible to circulate both passenger and freight trains while maintaining similar construction costs and acceptable maintenance costs. As a result of all of this, the aims and contributions made possible by the completion of this thesis have been as follows:
- To analyze the design parameters limitation defined in several technical standards which are used to design highspeed railway lines.
- To propose a graphical method for designing the horizontal alignment (the cant, The radii and the clothoid) and apply the method to a real example and compare our proposed design with the original project for a real case study in Spain.
- To review and compare several degradation models gathered from the literature, that evaluate the degradation of ballasted bed and to propose an adaptation to assess the settlement depending on the alignment design.
- To apply the BIM methodology to a real case of study of the rail track life cycle for high-speed railway lines to create BIM prototype libraries in operation and maintenance cost that might be utilized for railway facilities and other public infrastructures.
La tesis obtuvo la calificación de Sobresaliente Cum Laude.