A team of engineers of the U.S.-based Wabtec Corporation, that merged with GE Transportation globally a year ago, has been monitoring the health and running conditions of trains in several geographies from its 24/7 Mechanical Labs situated in Bengaluru, since the onset of the pandemic.
Wabtec Corporation, that supplies locomotives, signalling, braking and transit systems, and digital solutions world over, has over 23,000 locomotives running on rail networks across countries, including over 200 in India.
Once the lockdown kicked in during the pandemic, Wabtec’s Mechanical Labs in Bengaluru started working round-the-clock to support and monitor customers’ locomotives across geographies, including Turkey, Kazakhstan and Finland, seamlessly and remotely. Earlier, these labs didn’t have the flexibility to work completely remote without physically accessing locomotives.
“Typically, a locomotive has over 300,000 parts and 100 plus critical parts and these need to meet stringent life expectations in tough operating conditions. These are unusual times when freight locomotives continue to operate to ensure movement of goods and services are not compromised,” said Gopal Madabhushi, global director, India Engineering Site, Wabtec Corporation.
Wabtec has invested over $30 million in India in building 23 rigs, facilities and capabilities to validate most of these critical parts. This validation includes performance studies, characterisation of failure modes, life predictions, control strategies and sensitive analysis, etc. Mechanical Labs’ team typically completes 100 to 120 tests in a year and clocks machine time of 30,000 hours to 40,000 hours per year.
“All our locomotives have a Digital Twin developed using IoT, analytics and machine learning methods. This helps us identify technical issues remotely and provide immediate solutions and enables the customer to keep high utilisation levels,” said Mr. Madabhushi. “We have completed over 100 days of operations without a single untoward incident. Locomotives that are equipped to perform without any downtime are extremely critical these days when governments and enterprises are busy ensuring a steady supply of essentials to billions of people,”’ he added.