No label defined (Q4944699)

The starting point of this paper is the modeling of a railroad rail. It is considered as an infinitely long elastic strip of depth \(d\). The supporting elements beneath the rail are modeled as an elastic half-plane (infinite depth). Normal and tangential tractions are applied to the top surface of the rail. The partial differential equations obtained from elasticity theory are solved using Fourier integral transforms. This necessitates the evaluation of semi-infinite integrals. Usually this is done by evaluation from zero to a number which is supposed to be sufficiently large to capture the important information. The authors approximate the tail of the integrand by a first-order asymptotic expansion. They present a numerical application of their method in which detailed stress distributions below the contact patch are computed.