INVESTIGATING THE DYNAMICS OF A SPECIAL TYPE OF A FLOATING- SLAB TRACKS Sateh Alabbasi 1 , Mohammed Hussein 2 , Osama Abdeljaber 3 and Onur Avci 4 1 Research Assistant, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Qatar Transportation and Traffic Safety Center, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar. Email: sa1107021@qu.edu.qa 2 Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar. Email: mhussein@qu.edu.qa 3 Research Assistant, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar. Email: o.abdeljaber@qu.edu.qa 4 Formerly, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar. Email: oavci@vt.edu Abstract The main purpose of railway trains is to transport large number of passengers and goods. The rate of degradation of railway tracks should be reduced to minimize the maintenance activities and the associated financial and social impacts. Degradation of tracks are influenced by the track dynamics, which also affects the ride quality and the levels of emission of noise and the generation of ground-borne noise and vibration. Investigating the dynamic behavior of railway tracks is important. A number of numerical approaches were reported in the literature on investigating the dynamic behavior of both types of railway tracks; ballast tracks and slab tracks (including floating-slab tracks with continuous and discontinuous slabs). In this paper, a special type of floating slab track is modelled. The track has periodical grooves along the concrete slab, where one slab unit consists of two segments with different masses and stiffness. The model uses the repeating unit method and utilizes the periodic-infinite structure theory. The model considers both bending and torsional dynamic effects. The model is utilized in a parametric study to investigate the effect of changing the depth of the groove on the dynamics of the track. The parametric study shows the large effect of varying the groove thickness only under 50% of the full thickness of the slab. Keywords: Floating-Slab Track, Railway Dynamic Behavior, Parametric Study, Numerical Modelling. 842 COMPDYN 2019 7 th ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering M. Papadrakakis, M. Fragiadakis (eds.) Crete, Greece, 24–26 June 2019 Available online at www.eccomasproceedia.org Eccomas Proceedia COMPDYN (2019) 842-850 ISSN:2623-3347 © 2019 The Authors. Published by Eccomas Proceedia. Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of COMPDYN 2019. doi: 10.7712/120119.6962.19626