Impact statement: This research is undertaken as a collaborative project with industry partners, Geophysical Survey Systems, Inc. and Sperry Rail Service, to develop a complete Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) system for railroads and/or their subcontractors to automatically identify areas where there are railroad track ballast problems in an accurate and reliable manner.

The objective of the project is to automate and test previously demonstrated methods of collecting ground penetrating radar data, which was found to be suitable for the development of a quantitative assessment of the ballast and sub-ballast condition, including accurate assessment of its physical state and potentially indicative of the degree of ballast fouling, the main indicator of ballast degradation. The project work is broken down into three areas: (1) Equipment procurement and setup; (2) data collection; and (3) algorithm development. The University of Illinois team will be responsible for the evaluation of modified common midpoint (Modified CMP) approach and ballast thickness algorithm tasks.