Abstract
In the railway engineering, the effect of a rolling wheel on the generation and propagation of micro cracks at the surface of a rail has been investigated for long period as one of the most important issues. On the other hand, recent development of high performance computers makes molecular dynamics one of the useful methods for investigating the materials properties at a scale of atoms and molecules. In this study, the molecular dynamics simulation is applied to the phenomena of micro crack generation and propagation at the rail surface during the long term rolling contact with wheels passing over them. EAM potential, which is regarded as very effective for metallic materials simulations, is employed as a potential function to introduce the mutual interaction among atoms in the molecular dynamics models. The resultant atomic behaviors in and around the cracks will be compared with the results obtained by the continuum mechanics analysis.
