Study on embedded crack behaviours of the rail due to cyclic rolling contact

Rolling contact fatigue involving cracks in rail has been a concern over the years. The presence of cracks in rail can result in catastrophic outcomes for the railway industries. Rolling contact fatigue is inevitable due to the excessive wheel and rail contact stress from the daily railway operation. A lot of studies had been made in investigating the stress intensity factor, thermal loading and fracture toughness of the rail with embedded crack but little mentioned on the fatigue behaviour of embedded cracks in rail due to cyclic rolling contact. In our current study, numerical simulations on the fatigue behaviours of embedded crack in the rail were carried out, with validation of numerical simulations from various open literature. ABAQUS ver6.19 was used to perform Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) in simulating the fatigue behaviours of 33 cases of the embedded cracks in the rail under various configurations, in terms of crack sizes, crack relative distance to the surface, stress ratio, etc. The trend of varying parameters and the crack propagation were plotted and further discussed.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering