Fracture Mechanics in Railway Applications - An Overview

Abstract

An introduction to the most important areas of fracture mechanics application to railway components is provided along with an introduction to the present workshop. The discussed topics are safety relevant railway components such as axles, wheels and rails. For railway axles problems of damage tolerance design are briefly discussed in the context of users experience and maintenance issues. An overview is given on fracture mechanics analyses reported in the literature as well as those presented at the workshop. With respect to railway wheels it is distinguished between block-braked and disk-braked wheels and between surface induced and subsurface induced cracks. Problems such as the residual stress field generated by thermal stresses during the braking process, special aspects of rolling contact fatigue (out-of phase loading, mixed mode crack extension, the role of a lubricant, crack branching, etc.) are introduced. A brief survey of the published work and the workshop presentations on railway wheels is given.