Abstract
The rail/wheel rolling contact affects the microstructure in the surface layer of rail. Recently. continuum damage mechanics allows us to describe the microprocesses involved during the straining of materials and structures at the macroscale. Elastic and plastic strains. the corresponding hardening effects are generally accepted to be represented by global continuum variables. The purpose of continuum damage mechanics is to introduce the possibility of describing the coupling effects between damage processes and the stress-strain behavior of materials. In this study. the continuum damage mechanics caused by elastic deformation was briefly introduced and applied to the fatigue damage of the rails under the condition of cyclic loading. The material parameter for damage analysis was first determined so that it could reproduce the life span under the compressive loading in the vicinity of fatigue limit. Some numerical studies have been conducted to show the validity of the present computational mechanics analysis.