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.
Die Sicherheit von Radsatzwellen beruht gegenwärtig auf zwei Säulen: der Schwingfestigkeitsauslegung und periodischen Inspektionen. Ausgehend von einem Schadensfall, der gebrochenen ICE 3-Welle von Köln, 2008, sollen ausgewählte Aspekte beider Säulen diskutiert und Vorschläge zur weiteren Verbesserung gemacht werden. Diese betreffen u.a. Fragen einer Betriebszeitbegrenzung, Veränderungen der Schwingfestigkeit während des Betriebs infolge von Korrosion und Steinschlag, den Einfluss von Korrosion auf Schwingrissinitiierung und -fortschritt, den potentiellen Einfluss nichtmetallischer Einschlüsse auf die Schwingfestigkeit, die Möglichkeiten sie im Rahmen der Qualitätssicherung zu detektieren sowie Fragen der Bruchmechanik und der Zuverlässigkeit zerstörungsfreier Schwingriss-Prüfverfahren im Rahmen eines Konzepts regelmäßiger Inspektionen.
On July 9, 2008 a high speed train derailed in Cologne main Station, Germany at a low speed because an axle was broken. Fortunately, the derailment happened at a low speed so that nobody was injured. The reason for the broken axle was investigated and it turned out that most likely large inclusions located shortly undemeath the surface in a T-transition were the origin of the final crack. Basing on that result, a systematic investigation on existing safety assessments of railway axles was performed. This results in an analysis of the production process of axles and in a critical review of existing of existing assessments. Improvements and future developments are outlined.
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.
The paper provides a discussion on damage tolerance options applied to railway axles and factors influencing the residual lifetime as well as the required inspection interval. These comprise material properties such as the scatter of the da/dNΔK curve, the fatigue crack propagation threshold ΔKth and the toughness of the material. Parameters affecting axle loading such as the press fit, rotating bending, load history and mixed crack opening modes are discussed. Finally the influence of the initial crack geometry on residual lifetime is simulated.
The aim of this paper is a collection of stress intensity factor solutions for cracks in railway axle geometries which the authors of the present special issue developed and/or used for damage tolerance analyses. These solutions comprise closed form analytical as well as tabled geometry functions and they refer to solid as well as hollow axles and various crack sites such as the T- and V-notch and the axle body.