Comprehensive sustainable anti-pollution treatment for the creation of green railway corridors

The project seeked to create green railway corridors by means of systems for removing contaminants associated with the operation of the infrastructure, especially in relation to ballast, allowing an environmental improvement of the track itself and its surrounding area.

To do this, it intended to design several systems for heavy metals and hydrocarbon pollutants capture and removal through different technologies:

• Sol-gel ballast coating composed of silicon oxide and complexing functional groups capable of absorbing heavy metals, and photocatalytic titanium oxide capable of degrading hydrocarbons
• Ballast modified by fixing ionically printed polymers based on polyurethanes
• Soil microbial population phytoremediation and bioaugmented processes