from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
The level of fatigue damage in railway wheel sets is one of limited parameters of rail vehicles reliability. Then new design methods of axles improving fatigue strength, is proposed. Using induction hardening high compression stresses into sub-surface layers of the axle are introduced, which prevents propagation of short fatigue cracks. The positive effect of axle induction hardening on fatigue limit has been already found earlier, however the reasonable industrial technology has been not yet developed. This paper presents axle induction hardening technology developed in BONATRANS GROUOP a.s. The basic mechanical properties and fatigue characteristics of induction hardened axles made of EA4T (25CrMo4) steel, commonly used in Europe in high-speed rail vehicles are compared, with fatigue behaviours of induction hardened axles made of S38C (AISI 1038) steel used in the Shinkansen high-speed trains. Positive effect of induction hardening on axle fatigue characteristics using newly developed method has been unambiguously proved.
Keywords: Fatigue limit, fatigue crack propagation, fatigue design, railway axles, induction hardening© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.