• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.552-557
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• 2015

Ballast gravel in a railroad field is often polluted by grease and heavy metals. In this paper, the performances of a dry cleaning method for polluted ballast gravel in which pollutants on the gravel surface can be physically removed was extensively studied. A polluted ballast cleaning device able to shoot emery blasting media onto the surface using compressed air was prepared. Polluted ballast gravel was put into this device for cleaning, with the treatment time varied from 1 to 10 min. The cleaning efficiency of the total petroleum hydrocarbons and heavy metals were studied. The total petroleum hydrocarbon removal efficiency was 70-80% for gravels sampled from a locomotive waiting line, while it was 40-60% for gravels sampled from a turnout area. The heavy metal removal efficiency exceeded 90% for copper and lead, while it was 65-80% for nickel and zinc. This system was found to be effective for the remediation of polluted ballast gravels.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.597-603
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• 2005

The remediation of railroad contaminated soil is gaining wide attention, recently. In railroad field, modification of diesel supply field, equipment of roll pad, FRP panel, and iron pannel under diesel locomotive storages are used for the prevention of contamination expansions. However, cheap and efficient remediation technology has not been suggested yet. In this study, the contaminated ballast was remediated by blasting technology. Because the contaminants mainly resides on the surface of ballast, blasting these contaminants make it available to recycle the ballast. We carried out the remediation of oil-contaminated ballasts using the blasting technology, and we could remediate them nicely. This technology is expected to be used for the cheap and quick remediation of contaminated ballast.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.365-373
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• 2017

This study proposes a newly developed dry washing method for removing pollutants such as total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) and oxidized iron from the surface of ballast gravel. A batch-type dry washing method showed a good performance in a previous study. In this study, a continuous-type dry washing system, instead of a batch-type system, was prepared to improve the efficiency of the system. A drier and a separator were also applied to this system as pre-treatment process, and the performance of this system was evaluated. In this experiment, blasting media was blasted on the polluted gravels through 12 nozzles by a pressure of $5-6kg/cm^2$ for 20-30 mins to remove TPH and oxidized iron. It was found to be possible to remove 80-90% of TPH and oxidized iron by using this system. Several ways to improve the performance were suggested in this study.