Fatigue fracture and fatigue life assessment of railway wheel using non‐linear model for fatigue crack growth

•This paper provides a method for solving 3D FCG in a railway wheel steel.•The non‐linear Kujawski‐Ellyin model has been adopted for the FCG.•We estimate the fatigue life of a railway wheel steel using RICC model.•A significant improvement in the accuracy of the model results has been achieved.•Comparison between experimental and numerical results has shown a good agreement. In this paper, the fatigue behavior of railway wheel specimens subjected to cyclic loading have been investigated via experimental tests and numerical analysis. The material behaviour of the wheel specimen has been modelled by means of the Ramberg‐Osgood equation. The non‐linear Kujawski‐Ellyin (KE) model has been adopted for the fatigue crack propagation under small‐scale yielding (SSY) conditions. The formulation of the rigid-insert crack closure (RICC) model has been applied to a specimen of railway wheel that has the same conditions as a real instance. The results indicate that the fatigue life of specimens decreases with any increase in load level.