Asa Whitney Professor of Dynamical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Fellow ASME.
BOOK REVIEWS
In railroad engineering parlance, a "shell" is a plate-like
fragment which flakes or "spalls" off the surface of a rail due
to a shallow subsurface crack running parallel to the rail surface. When shells turn downward, they can lead to a
"transverse defect or detail fracture" on a transverse cross
section of the rail. Keer, Farris, and Steele use a twodimensional linear fracture mechanics model as a "first step
towards gaining insight into the shell/detail fracture transition." They draw upon a number of their previous publications dealing with crack path stability and the interaction of
surface indenters with discrete dislocations, to determine the
Mode I and Mode II stress intensity factors for various positions of a sliding indenter (representing a wheel). In this
preliminary report on the complex problem, they highlight
numerical results on their studies of crack path deviation.
The literature (forty references) dealing with the mechanics
of spalling failures is reviewed by Sheppard and Comninou.
This reviewer regrets that space limitations prevent him
from calling specific attention to the many other fine papers in
this excellent compendium. Since the problems it deals with
are of great interest to engineers working outside the field of
rail/wheel contact mechanics, it is likely that readers of this
journal will find one or more papers of interest to them in the
complete list of papers given below.
Elastic Contact Mechanics
J. J. Kalker, Wheel-rail wear calculations with the program CONTACT.
G. Bjorkman and Anders Klarbring, Shakedown and residual stresses in frictional systems.
J. R. Barber, Thermal effects on elastic contact.
W. Poole, The measurement of the contact area between opague objects
under static and dynamic rolling conditions.
A. P. S. Selvadurai, A contact problem for the penny-shaped crack.