Prediction of fatigue crack initiation life in railheads using finite element analysis

Abstract The current study introduced a numerical procedure to study fatigue crack initiation life in railheads. It was mainly performed by a three-dimensional (3D) explicit finite element (FE) model that accounts for bending stresses due to global dynamic response of railway track and local stresses due to wheel-rail contact loads. The results obtained from FE analysis were combined with the critical plane approach and multiaxial low cyclic fatigue mode to predict crack orientation and fatigue crack initiation life. This model was applied to a case study in the first line of Greater Cairo Underground Metro (GCUM) in Egypt. The advantages of the proposed model are that it can represent realistic wheel-rail contact geometry and non-linearity of material behavior together with dynamic response and cyclic loading. A good agreement of cracks orientations and locations of the field observations with the predicted ones based on FE results was achieved.