Fracture mechanics and scale effects in the fatigue of railway axles

Fatigue of railway axles is one of the basic problems of fatigue. However, in spite of the criticality of this component, modern approaches have not been used for addressing a critical revision of traditional design. The scope of this paper is to study the scale effects in fatigue limit and in crack growth rate for a high strength steel used for high speed railway axles. Fatigue limit tests on micro-notched specimens led to the determination of fatigue thresholds for small cracks of the examined steel. This allowed us to successfully analyse the 'scale effect' and the fatigue strength of full-scale axles in terms of threshold stress for short cracks emanating from small non-metallic inclusions. A series of crack propagation tests on small scale specimens lead to the definition of an EPFM crack propagation model which has been successfully compared with propagation data on full-scale components. These results support the application of the crack propagation model for the determination of axle inspection intervals. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.