Failure of railway axles has been the problem which gave origin to the studies about 'fatigue'. The modern approach to the structural integrity of these safety components is to complement the traditional designwith a 'damage toleranc' analysis.

A Special Issue just appeared onto Eng. Fracture Mechanics presents some of the most recent research.

In the last decade, different
cyclic plasticity models, based on the “continuum” approach, have been proposed
in order to account for different mechanical effects (such as ratchetting,
strain range dependence, non-proportional loading and memory effect), [1, 2]. A
disadvantage of this approach is the elevated number of model parameters
introduced in order to correctly predict the material behaviour. The determination
of these parameters, usually difficult and expensive, is one of the reasons why the modern
constitutive models are not widely used in finite element simulations of