Abstract:

Billions of sleepers are used on railways around the world today. As the share of railways in the transportation sector is increasing, the demand for sleepers is also increasing. Due to the various capacity problems of the sleepers, a significant number of them need to be replaced every year. For this reason, a significant part of the budgets of the railway organizations have to be devoted to sleeper maintenance operations. On the other hand, “new generation” feasible solutions have become compulsory due to the high speed modern railway operations. Production of billions of sleepers have significant environmental damage due to extra cement, aggregate, steel and fuel consumption. Today, many countries around the world have various sleeper patents suitable for their operating conditions and local resources. In addition, in the "new generation" sleeper models; high-cost solutions that can meet today's low maintenance requirements have become a must. On the other hand, steel reinforcements used in the construction industry have various disadvantages such as corrosion and fatigue. In this context, the use of fiber reinforced polymer reinforcements in railway sleepers, which has started to replace steel reinforcements in developed countries, has been seen as an alternative solution. In this article, after mentioning the various problems of existing reinforced concrete sleepers in the current literature, the possibility of solving these problems by using domestic glass and carbon fiber reinforced polymer raw materials is investigated in the light of experimental studies. As a result, positive results have been obtained in terms of developing innovative national sleeper models with lower cost and higher service life than their counterparts in the world.

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