Corrosion-fatigue under Rainwater of a Q&T Steel: Experiments and Probabilistic Description

Corrosion-fatigue is one of the key failure modes of railway axles. We show the results of a series of corrosion-fatigue experiments under rainwater with a Q&T steel adopted for manufacturing railway axles. The process can be divided into the following phases by: i) an early formation of pits followed by ii) a pit-to-crack transition at approximately 30 μm diameter and iii) the growth of small cracks with a pronounced scatter. The variability of the different phases needs to be accurately described for achieving a realistic life prediction and a good comparison with full-scale experiments.