Residual fatigue life estimation of railway wheelset

The first part of this master's thesis deals with the high cycle fatigue of materials, especially on growing cracks using linear elastic fracture mechanics. Much of this work is focused on the concept of stress intensity factor. This concept is nowadays one of the most widely used concepts for describing a body with crack. The first part ends with theoretical approaches to determine the residual fatigue life of the body with a crack. The second part of this master's thesis is focused on the determination of residual fatigue life of a specified railway wheelset. An existence of crack-like defect is assumed at the railway wheelset. The goal of this master's thesis is to estimate how long it will take to grow from initial defect to a critical crack length. The last part of this master's thesis is devoted to addiction order load cycles on crack growth rate