Modeling fluid flow through railway ballast

Floodwater can potentially damage railway tracks severely, and the most damaging is when it scours the ballast, which can cause significant train accidents. Therefore, water flow through railway ballast must be accurately predicted to assess and mediate the risk of ballast damage. The current study presents a series of related topics concerning fluid flow through porous media, including railway structure deterioration, water flow through ballast under various conditions, and a stochastic water flow model. Significant emphasis is placed on the ballast’s gradation and on ballast fouling which plays an important role in flow through it. We have added brief preliminaries of the basic mathematical and physical methods to understand better the stochastic process and the finite element method (FEM) use. These preliminaries generally focus on the water flow with a few solutions using different mathematical methods applicable to our partial differential equation model.