Fatigue crack growth of a railway wheel steel and fatigue life prediction under spectrum loading conditions

In this paper, fatigue life and crack growth retardation of railway wheel specimens due to spectrum loading have been investigated. For this purpose, numerical and experimental methods are used to investigate the behavior of crack growth in the wheel specimens. The crack propagation is examined by using the stress intensity factor (SIF) values achieved from boundary element (BE) analyses. The non-linear Kujawski-Ellyin (KE) model has been adopted for the crack propagation under small-scale yielding (SSY) conditions. The periodic overloads have remained constant and the effect of overload ratio (OLR) and occurrence ratios (OCR) on the fatigue life has been investigated.