In April 1990 a conference was held at the Cracow Institute of Technology, Cracow, Poland. The title of that conference was "Residual Stresses in Rails - Effects on Rail Integrity and Railroad Economics" and its themes were the measurement and prediction of residual stresses in rails, but, as the sub-title suggests, the intention was also to provide a link between research and its application to the practical railway world. At the Cracow conference there were 40 participants with 5 railways and 5 rail makers being represented and 25 papers were given. The Cracow conference was a success, and...

The contents of this book include: Preface; Rolling Contact Phenomena; Linear Elasticity; Finite Element Methods for Rolling Contact; Plastic Deformation in Rolling Contact; Non-Steady State Rolling Contact and Corrugations; Modelling of Tyre Force and Moment Generation; Rolling Noise; and Lubrication.

This book is intended for mechanicians, engineering mathematicians, and, generally for theoretically inclined mechanical engineers. It has its origin in my Master's Thesis (J 957), which I wrote under the supervision of Professor Dr. R. Timman of the Delft TH and Dr. Ir. A. D. de Pater of Netherlands Railways. I did not think that the surface of the problem had even been scratched, so I joined de Pater, who had by then become Professor in the Engineering Mechanics Lab. of the Delft TH, to write my Ph. D. Thesis on it. This thesis (1967) was weil received in railway circles, which is due more...

This volume presents a collection of papers on the theme of rail integrity, which were presented at a meeting in Delft from 24--26th June, 1992. Rolling contact fatigue is a failure mode which is increasingly being recognised as a threat to the reliability of modern heavy freight and high speed railway systems. These papers describe the current understanding of the problem and what rail steel technology and maintenance procedures have to offer to combat it.

A recommendation to hold a symposium on contact problems in mechanics, sponsored by the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM), was made by the Engineering Mechanics Group of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology. In order to outline the scope of the Symposium and select the place and date IUTAM appointed a Study-group of seven members in 1971. Following an interchange of views between these members the Study-group proposed to IUTAM to organise an International Symposium on the Mechanics of the Contact between Deformable Bodies on...