TY - JOUR A1 - Zerbst, Uwe A1 - Klinger, Christian A1 - Klingbeil, Dietmar T1 - Structural assessment of railway axles - A critical review N2 - The safety assessment of railway axles is based on a two-stage approach: fatigue strength design and regular inspections which, in terms of a general safety philosophy refer to safe-life and damage tolerance concepts. Starting with a recent failure case, a broken axle of a German high speed train, a discussion is presented on issues of both safety levels. These include ideas for finite life design, the treatment of in-service effects on the fatigue strength due to flying ballast damage and corrosion pits, the effect of corrosion on fatigue crack initiation and propagation, potential effects of non-metallic inclusions in steels, the way to detect them by quality control measures and reliability aspects of non-destructive testing with respect to the detection of fatigue cracks. Proposals are made how the safety level could be further improved. KW - Railway axles KW - Safe life design KW - Damage tolerance design KW - Non-destructive testing KW - Flying ballast impact KW - Corrosion KW - Non-metallic inclusions PY - 2013 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350630712002531 SN - 1350-6307 SN - 1873-1961 VL - 35 IS - Special issue on ICEFA V- Part 1 SP - 54 EP - 65 PB - Elsevier Science Publ. CY - Oxford AN - OPUS4-29715 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -