TY - JOUR A1 - Zerbst, Uwe A1 - Beretta, S. T1 - Failure and damage tolerance aspects of railway components N2 - Railway structures such as rails and axles are safety relevant components since any failure includes the risk of catastrophic derailment. This paper gives a brief overview on the most important potential failure scenarios driven by fatigue crack initiation and propagation and discusses the effects of important influencing factors such as vehicle weight and speed, track quality and environmental conditions. The present paper summarizes earlier work of the authors in this field. KW - Railway rails KW - Railway axles KW - Fatigue crack propagation KW - Damage tolerance KW - Fracture mechanics PY - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engfailanal.2010.06.001 SN - 1350-6307 SN - 1873-1961 VL - 18 IS - 2 SP - 534 EP - 542 PB - Elsevier Science Publ. CY - Oxford AN - OPUS4-22639 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zerbst, Uwe A1 - S., Romano A1 - D., Manenti A1 - S., Beretta T1 - Semi-probabilistic method for residual lifetime of aluminothermic welded rails with foot cracks N2 - One of the most frequent and dangerous failure modes in continuous welded rails is fatigue crack Propagation terminated by brittle fracture. Due to the brittleness of the weld material and HAZ and the scatter in its mechanical properties, a statistical approach is necessary. The paper deals with surface cracks at the foot base of aluminothermic welded rails, developing a probabilistic methodology for determining the day by day prospective failure probability. The investigations presented here comprise weld material characterization, simulation of fatigue crack propagation and finally the determination of the failure probability using the Monte Carlo method. The effect of various parameters, such as axle weight, Initial crack size, residual stresses, fatigue crack propagation threshold and date of inspection were analyzed. The results show that, independent of the date of the last inspection, almost any failure event happens in wintertime. This is in accordance with practical experience. However, from the proposed analysis it is evident that the main parameter controlling rail fracture is not only the minimum local temperature, but the temperature range over the whole year. Finally, the results are compared to the standard rail classification method. KW - Railway rails KW - Foot crack KW - Fatigue crack KW - Failure probability KW - Residual lifetime PY - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tafmec.2016.05.002 SN - 0167-8442 VL - 85 IS - Part B SP - 398 EP - 411 PB - Elsevier AN - OPUS4-38156 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -