Resumen de Study on the wear and rolling contact fatigue behavior of rail steel grades using a twin disc laboratory equipment

María Panera Castro, D. Álvarez, J.M. Artímez, P. García Méndez, H. Pérez

• The wear resistance and the rolling contact fatigue (RCF) behaviour of different rail steel grades versus a railway wheel steel is analysed in this work. For this purpose, a twin-disc test was setup, in order to replicate the in-service damage suffered by the rails due to the contact pressure appearing in the rail and to analyse the wear and RCF behaviour of the rail steel in a quick and efficient way. Different rail steel grades have been studied under different test conditions and the influence of the applied load and the sliding rate on the wear and RCF behaviour of these materials has been analysed. At the end of the tests, the specimen mass loss was determined and degradation phenomena assessed by metallographic characterization. The nature, shape and size of the cracks were analysed and compared to those obtained in the tests carried out with the same materials at a pilot plant scale. It has been demonstrated that the proposed Twin-Disc tests are able to predict the ...