Study of Heat Treatment on Rails and its Effect on Alloy Steel

The importance of various forms of heat treatment operations on alloy steel in order to forester the problem that may arise in making a wrong choice of these steel materials, which may give rise to serious disruption in terms of human safety, higher cost and ultimately failure of the rails. This paper reports investigation made on effects of heat treatment on the micro-structural and mechanical property of alloy steel. The method of a steel rail includes, heating of steel to austenziation temperature them cooling the rail by hot water jet until a surface temperature not below 4200C and finally cooling the rail by an air jet at least to pearlite transformation temperature, thereby transforming the structure of a surface portion of the rail head into a uniform and fine pearlite structure. Conclusion of this paper is that heat treatment increases the service life of rails and various properties of alloy steel.