Rolling contact in railways: Modelling, simulation and damage prediction

Various kinds of defects are induced by rolling contact on the rail track: kidney-shaped cracking, shelling and nowadays squat and head checking, which are studied under the sponsorship of the French national railways company SNCF. Modelling of such defects requires the development of specific computational tools in order to evaluate, in the vicinity of the wheel-rail contact zone, the mechanical state (stress, plastic strain cycle and residual stress pattern), which is at the origin of the damages. Moreover, since the loadings induce multiaxial stress and strain states, it is necessary to use a multiaxial criterion to predict the occurrence of fatigue cracks. This review paper is devoted to the presentation of the main results of this research.