Experimental and analytical investigation of rolling contact fatigue for the evaluation of railway rail

초록

A squat is a type of surface breaking crack that is observed on the running band of tangent rail. It occurs on the surface of rail due to unidirectional plastic flow caused by repeated wheel sliding and high traction force. Prediction of crack growth is one of the urgent works to prevent a rail from failure and develop cost effective railway maintenance strategy. Many attempts have been made to predict the crack growth experimentally and analytically. In this study, we performed crack growth simulation both with a twin disc test arrangement and a simulation model based on the Fletcher and Kapoor’s 2.5D model, and predicted crack growth rate respectively. The predicted results showed a good correlation.