The competitive role of wear and RCF in a rail steel

A model for assessing wear and rolling contact fatigue (RCF) in rails is proposed, with particular emphasis for their competitive role. RCF was studied taking into account different mechanisms of crack nucleation and propagation in different working conditions, and failure indexes are proposed to predict which damage mechanism prevails. Wear was investigated in terms of wear rate under different working conditions; a method to compare it to crack propagation rate is proposed in order to predict if wear can remove surface cracks due to RCF. The effectiveness of the method was verified by experimental tests.