Abstract: To ensure the rail transportations safety, evaluation of fatigue behavior of the rail steel is necessary. High cycle fatigue behaviour of a rail steel was the subject of investigation in this research using fracture mechanics. Finite element method (FEM) was used for analyzing the distribution of the stresses on the rail, exerted by the external load. FEM analysis showed that the ...

Accelerated Destructive Degradation Tests (ADDTs) provide reliability information quickly. An ADDT plan specifies factor level combinations of an accelerating variable (e.g., temperature) and evaluation time and the allocations of test units to these combinations. This paper describes methods to find good ADDT plans for an important class of destructive degradation models. First, a collection o...

Self-healing polymers, based on microencapsulated dicyclopentadiene and Grubbs' catalyst embedded in the polymer matrix, are capable of responding to propagating fatigue cracks by autonomic processes that lead to higher endurance limits and life extension, or even the complete arrest of the crack growth. The amount of fatigue-life extension depends on the relative magnitude of the mechanical ki...

The 2-parameter family of probability distributions introduced by Birnbaum & Saunders characterizes the fatigue failure of materials subjected to cyclic stresses and strains. It is shown that the methods of accelerated life testing are applicable to the Birnbaum–Saunders distribution for analyzing accelerated lifetime data, and the (inverse) power law model is used due to its justification for ...