On the railhead material damage of insulated rail joints: Is it by ratchetting or alternating plasticity?

Railhead becomes severely stressed due to localised contact loadings. This is more critical in the vicinity of endposts of an insulated rail joint. Popular IRJ endpost materials are fibreglass (fb), polytetrafluoroethylene (ptfe) and nylon66 (ny). A 3D finite element analysis is carried out to study stress distributions in railhead material near the endposts. The progressive damage parameter, von Mises stress and other residual stress and strain plots indicate that plastic deformation and material degradation occur at sub-surface levels of the railhead material. Although fb and ptfe are better endpost materials than ny, ny displays superior performance over the other two.