Failure prevention in steel structure with interacting cracks

Abstract

In the railway industry, most of the train derailment accidents were due to rolling contact fatigue failure. Thus, ifadvance and detailed studies aredone onto railway fatigue life prediction, although fatigue crack growth is inevitable, however through understanding the crack propagation behaviors, a lot of accidents might be preventable. Previously, there were many studies had been done pertainingtofatigue crack growth to investigate stress intensity in rail,but lack of fatigue study on simultaneous cracks subjected to cyclic loading.Asa complete full-scale fatigue experiment is time-consuming and costly, the author utilizes thesimulation software Abaqus 6.19, through its extended finite element method (XFEM) to do numerical simulation. By investigatingthe crack growth behaviors from the results obtained, to find out the correlations between the crack propagation with various simultaneous cracks configurations and loading parameters. The outcome can be used for fatigue failure assessment and future rail design.