Keywords: three-dimensional rail residual stress, manufacture induced stresses, experimental analysis of rail residual stress, destructive testing, neutron diffraction, hybrid methods, physically based data enhancement.

This paper presents the results of a hybrid, experimental-numerical investigation of the three-dimensional rail residual stress in several rail samples. The main interest is to study the changing patterns of the rail residual stress as it accumulates on different portions of the rail manufacture process, to find their distributions and amplitudes that might be of importance for follow-up studies, both theoretical and experimental, devoted for example to a better understanding of rail manufacturing processes and their optimization or to a better modeling of the actual stress fields in rails mounted in track. The examinations included four samples: an air cooled rail, an air cooled and roller straightened rail, a head hardened rail and a head hardened and roller straightened rail. All experiments were performed on the US CFI 136RE rail, cut into transverse and oblique slices and scanned for stresses with a neutron diffraction (ND) technique. A dedicated numerical procedure was used for physically based enhancement of the raw two-dimensional data and then for reconstruction of the original and undisturbed by the sectioning three-dimensional stress fields.

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