Damage tolerance investigations on rails

The paper summarises damage tolerance investigations on railway rails which the authors have carried out in the context of the German–French joint project NOVUM (novel methods for quantitative prediction of rail performance at increased service loads) [Girardi L, Heyder R, Dider L, Boulanger D. IDR2-NOVUM promises lower rail maintenance costs. Railway Gazette Int 2005;(July):439–41[1]]. The investigations include the determination of the crack driving force as a function of the various loading components a rail is subjected to and the simulation of residual lifetime. Features such as the local load input at the rail–wheel interface, dynamic effects and statistical aspects of crack resistance are explicitly taken into account.