Thermal load effects on fatigue life of a cracked railway wheel

AbstractIn this paper, fatigue life of a cracked railway wheel under thermo-mechanical loads is studied. For this purpose a FE model of a wheel, with two brake shoes and a portion of rail is created and suitable loads and boundary conditions are applied to the model. It is assumed that the wheel has contained an elliptical crack in the definite depth of the tread surface and thermalloads are determined by modeling the contact of the rail-wheel and two brake blocks. In order to investigate the thermalloads effect on the fatigue life of the cracked wheel, analyses areperformed in two cases: mech...