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Damage and Microstructure Evolution in Cast Hadfield Steels Used in Railway Crossings

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Intelligent Quality Assessment of Railway Switches and Crossings

Part of the book series: Springer Series in Reliability Engineering ((RELIABILITY))

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Abstract

Although the damage development in the railway steels is relatively well documented in the scientific literature, its appearance in railway crossings remains a quite complicated issue because of the extreme loading conditions during the train passage. The exact local conditions cannot be determined with sufficient accuracy, but the steel microstructure contains the traces of the mechanisms of microstructure and damage evolution. In this work, we discuss the microstructural evolution and damage in a field-loaded railway crossing made of cast austenitic Hadfield steel and subjected to impact and rolling contact fatigue (RCF) loading. A nanoscale twinning substructure surrounded by dislocation cells and a high dislocation density are identified using Electron Channeling Contrast Imaging (ECCI) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) in the deformed microstructure of Hadfield steels. The effect of these substructures as well as of the non-metallic inclusions and other casting defects on the damage development in the austenitic Hadfield steels is also discussed. Additionally, the strain-induced transformation of the austenite into martensite in the deformed crossing surface is studied by X-ray diffraction and magnetometer measurements. The results do not show evidence of strain-induced austenite-to-martensite transformation under impact and RCF loading of the railway crossings. ECCI in controlled diffraction conditions is used to study the fatigue crack growth in undeformed cast Hadfield steel specimens when subjected to laboratory scale fatigue testing. Furthermore, the role of twins and grain boundaries on the fatigue crack growth is discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This research was carried out under project number F91.10.12475b in the framework of the Partnership Program of the Materials innovation institute M2i (www.m2i.nl) and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) (www.fom.nl), which is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (www.nwo.nl). Authors would like to thank Dr. Michael Herbig, Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH, for providing necessary experimental facilities for this research. We would like to thank ProRail for its financial support and arranging the specimens for this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Ankit Kumar, Roumen Petrov & Jilt Sietsma

  2. Department of Electrical Energy, Metals, Mechanical Constructions and Systems, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Roumen Petrov & Jilt Sietsma

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  1. Ankit Kumar
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Correspondence to Jilt Sietsma .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Roberto Galeazzi

  2. Department of Wind Energy, Technical University of Denmark, Roskilde, Denmark

    Hilmar Kjartansson Danielsen

  3. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Bjarne Kjær Ersbøll

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Dorte Juul Jensen

  5. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Ilmar Santos

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Kumar, A., Petrov, R., Sietsma, J. (2021). Damage and Microstructure Evolution in Cast Hadfield Steels Used in Railway Crossings. In: Galeazzi, R., Kjartansson Danielsen, H., Kjær Ersbøll, B., Juul Jensen, D., Santos, I. (eds) Intelligent Quality Assessment of Railway Switches and Crossings. Springer Series in Reliability Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62472-9_4

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