Railway lines in deserts suffer from risks of migration of sand dunes, transport of sand by wind and its accumulation over the tracks. This paper focuses on causes, types, and different characteristics of sand movement in desert that affecting safety and performance of running trains. Risk and potential impact of accumulation of sand on Bahariya railway line located in Western Desert of Egypt such as; several derailments and contamination of track components are analysed. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of embankment height on sand accumulation. Thus, ANSYS FLUENT software is used to simulate the blown wind on the railway embankment to obtain the wind velocity vectors and contours. Hence, embankment height that reduces deposition and accumulation of sand over the track is obtained and recommended to 6 m. Cost analysis has been conducted to compare between the recent and the recommended embankments. It is concluded that cost of the recommended embankment is about 63% of the overall cost of the recent case. |
