Elasto-plastic crack growth in rails based on material forces

Report, 2012

This report investigates the behaviour of a generalized crack driving force under various loading conditions and for three different material behaviours: elastic; mixed isotropic and kinematic hardening; and nonlinear kinematic hardening with saturation. It is shown that the crack driving force, as derived in this paper, may lead to mesh dependent results for inelastic material behaviour under RCF loading conditions. Therefore, it is not a suitable quantity to use in simulations of crack growth in rails.