Ground Penetrating Radar: A Smart Sensor for the Evaluation of the Railway Trackbed

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has become an increasingly attractive method for the engineering community, in particular for shallow high-resolution applications such as railway trackbed evaluation. It is a non-destructive smart sensing technique, which can be applied dynamically to achieve a continuous profile of the trackbed structure. Due to recent hardware and software improvements, real time cursory analysis can be performed in the field. Based on collected field data, the present paper investigates the applicability of the GPR smart sensor system in terms of the railways trackbed assessment and concludes on the capability of the GPR sensing technique to assess adequately the ballast quality and the trackbed formation.