Wabtec Corporation
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A brief profile
Sujit John ,Sep 1, 2023: The Times of India
We are walking around what is said to be one of the world’s best locomotive equipment testing facilities. It’s in Whitefield in Bengaluru, and belongs to the $8-billion, US locomotive maker Wabtec. What is even more remarkable, we are told, is that almost all the equipment has been designed locally, at costs that are significantly lower than it is around the world.
Prasad S Gangi, director of mechanical engineering management at Wabtec, is the architect of this facility. As we go around, he shows us a fatigue test that is being done on brake calipers. These calipers are what apply brakes on the locomotive wheels. “In a locomotive, it may be used a few times a day. But we clamp and declamp eight times in a second, and take it to some 10 million cycles. We do two samples at a time, and a total of 50-60 samples. If the part fails in any region, we point that out and get an improved part. And rerun the test,” Prasad says.
At another point, couplers – which connect one rail car to another – are being tested for endurance. The testing machine simulates the up and down and lateral movements of these couplers as a train moves.
There’s a bench to test all the components of the fuel system – Prasad calls it the heart of an engine – and see if they are doing their intended functions.
At one point, we are treated to some really heavy sounds. “We have one of the biggest shakers in the business,” says Prasad. It’s a massive vibration machine. “We travel in a locomotive, collect the vibrations that are seen by the components while on the track, we take that as the input, and run the machine to create the same vibrations on those components and see if they are withstanding those conditions. The interaction between the rail and the wheel is very complex, very large forces are at work,” Prasad says. The tests are done for locomotive operators in many countries.
Different countries, Prasad says, have different vibration profiles. We now have a huge database of each country, and if I want to test for Kazakhstan, I can feed that vibration profile into this machine, and run it to see if the product withstands it,” he says, adding that in India, there may be only one or two other such machines, including with ISRO.
The vibration machine is bought from a company called Data Physics.
But much of the rest have been designed by Prasad and his team, using their years of experience. In-house designs have helped protect IPs, they have helped reduce dependence on vendors that often go out of business.
“Prasad has really exceeded expectations with everything and the whole world now sees the capabilities that we have in India, and is trying to put more and more work in here,” says Wabtec’s CTO Eric Gebhardt, who had come down to inaugurate an extension of the lab. “I love it that when they designed this facility, they designed it to be really digitally enabled. There are cameras on all of our test equipment and anybody anywhere in the world can tap in and watch the test being run and see all the information. And then we have these bots (Yes, those Temi robots are around us) that can roam around, which you can move remotely (from anywhere in the world) to exactly what you want to see.
Engineers don’t need to get on a plane and fly over here. And the equipment that Prasad’s designed is at a cost point that’s dramatically lower than if we went outside to get it done,” he says.
