Corrosion of rail tracks and their protection

Abstract

Rapid development of railway industry makes safety increasingly important. Wear, contact-impact, fatigue and corrosion are important factors initiating rail track degradation from the beginning, while corrosion attracts far less attention than other issues. Direct corrosion cost due to railway corrosion in China was 18.88 billion RMB, so corrosion definitely deserves more attention. This work has reviewed studies focussing exclusively on rail corrosion, including corrosion forms, protection and detection technologies. General corrosion on large rail surface is not limiting, while crevice corrosion between rail and liner, resulting in thinning of rail foot, is regarded significant but overlooked. Moreover, reciprocating micro-motion between rail foot and liner mechanically assists the ongoing of crevice corrosion. However, it was mentioned in very few reports and not investigated extensively. Coating and surface modification may be applied for mitigation of rail track corrosion. The weakness of coating is poor mechanical properties, while surface modification, including thermal spraying and laser cladding, may be a better way. Development of novel steel is another effective method, but loss of mechanical properties becomes obstacles for practical applications. Ultrasonic and infrared have been applied for detection, while more advanced technologies are promising. Suggestions are made on specific research topics in this field.

Microstructure Refinement on Crevice Corrosion of High-Speed Rail Steel U75V Visualized by an In Situ Monitoring System

“…The disc samples were immersed in 0.1 M NaCl after grinding with a 50 µm crevice gap. Considering surface roughness and machining tolerance regarding the contact surface between the rail foot and fastener (Xu et al, 2021), a gap size of 50 µm is regarded as a reasonable value in this work. Similarly, open circuit potential was measured to achieve stable OCP (ΔOCP/Δt < 3 mV/min, ca.…”

“…Wear, contact-impact, fatigue (or rolling contact fatigue, i.e., RCF), and corrosion are the main reasons for material degradation in rail tracks (Hernandez et al, 2007;Shurpali et al, 2012;Hernandez-Valle et al, 2013;Shariff et al, 2013;Safa et al, 2015;Zhao et al, 2015;Yazici and Yilmaz, 2018;Liu et al, 2019). Among these issues, corrosion attracts far less attention than the others while its damage is no less (Xu et al, 2021). This is because damage of materials caused by corrosion is unobservable from the beginning, but corrosion, especially localized corrosion, is usually an important precursor for accident or failure (Hill and Lillard, 2006;Li et al, 2017).…”

“…Corrosion occurred on the large surface of rails (e.g., on rail head, where wear and contact-impact are much more severe) is not crucial since it tends to develop into general corrosion instead of growing deep (Xu et al, 2021), and frequent contact between the rail and wheel inhibits the formation of an electrolyte layer as a precursor of localized corrosion. However, severe corrosion problems very often take place near the rail base and rail foot, resulting in thinning of specific section and instability of rail, thus inducing a potential risk of displacement, large stress, or even severe engineering failure (Xu et al, 2021).…”

“…Corrosion occurred on the large surface of rails (e.g., on rail head, where wear and contact-impact are much more severe) is not crucial since it tends to develop into general corrosion instead of growing deep (Xu et al, 2021), and frequent contact between the rail and wheel inhibits the formation of an electrolyte layer as a precursor of localized corrosion. However, severe corrosion problems very often take place near the rail base and rail foot, resulting in thinning of specific section and instability of rail, thus inducing a potential risk of displacement, large stress, or even severe engineering failure (Xu et al, 2021). Due to the special structure between the fastener system and rail foot section, the crevice corrosion issue on the rail track has been reported by Panda et al (2008), Panda et al (2009) and has been recently investigated in details by the authors of this work, especially under conditions of varying gap size (Xu et al, 2022).…”

A Model for Planning Wagonload Freight Transport Under Relative Uncertainty

“…The railway has very good development prospects, as many Polish and foreign research institutions conduct research on computer-aided development of railway infrastructure [11] and diagnostics of existing railway connections [17,18] with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles [10]. More and more innovative solutions are being implemented on the railways, which increase its attractiveness [20,34].…”