Research and Development
In-house laboratory spearheads research in welding technology As a global pioneer in flashbutt welding technology, Holland produces thousands of innovative products each year, and all of them are designed and built in its own in-house state-of-theart laboratory. Holland has been a leader in progressive and comprehensive solutions spanning the rail industry for 85 years. The US-based company is also the industry leader in the field of flash-butt welding across the globe, including Australia. Not only does it excel in terms of available resources, but also in experience and dedication to continual development of new technology that enables it to adapt to the evolving requirements of the railroad community. Holland’s Intelliweld Control System provides an unmatched degree of accuracy and quality in the production of rail welds. With the largest mobile flash-butt rail welding fleet in the world, the company prides itself as a pioneer in developing flash-butt welding technology that continues to provide high-quality and costeffective solutions. Indeed, most of Holland’s innovative welding solutions and industry-leading technology are designed and developed within a dedicated laboratory on-site at the Illinois facility, which houses a highly-skilled team of engineers and machinists who are responsible for the creation, manufacturing and refurbishment of rail welding equipment. As Holland’s Weld Quality, Research and Testing director Nicholas G Martino explains, having such an in-house workshop was absolutely necessary to produce the hundreds of thousands of state-of-theart welds every year. “We wanted to be capable of analysing swiftly and be in control of our product to produce an even better weld. This allowed us to have a better understanding of the flash butt welding process,” he said. “We research normal weld qualifications, our process capability and investigate any weld defects that may occur. When these weld defects occur, this
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Welds being cut in the Holland Rail Services Australia workshop for testing.
allows us to better document and manage a library of the processes we learned from them and improve processes and operator training.” Martino acknowledges that it’s rare to have the luxury of an exclusive laboratory, along with a dedicated research and development team. “Some of our competitors pay outside labs and don’t have internal processes/teams,” he said. “A third party lab can be beneficial but are generally used to just analyse incidents or products brought to them. “We can go above and beyond. We can go to the next higher level and ask how we can change or improve things. “We’re in control and we have the capability of understanding a weld from start to finish. “This also allows us to talk with our operations teams, and interface with teams who physically made the weld to talk through weld issues.” Some of the testing and research topics include Heat Affected Zones (cut, polish, and etch), hardness profiles, microstructure evaluation (cut, mount, polish, and etch), slow bend tests, non-destructive testing (NDT), ultrasonic test (UT), magnetic particle (MP), dye penetrant (DP) and more. “Not only do we do multiple types of testing, but we can also change parameters ourselves to get desired effects,” Martino said. “Because Holland controls the entire building and management of its operating fleet and teams, we get very close to predictive analytics with welding inputs and desired outcomes. “Labs can test specific welds, but they don’t know
the equipment like we do or how to manipulate to get a certain outcome.” Martino said there was little problem in translating the North American experiences to Australian specifications and qualifications. “Certain rail structures can have different alloys, which helps us determine how to tweak our “recipe” to make the best Holland weld,” he said. “Our lab supports the team directly and walking through issues that may occur out in the field. We also track all the inputs and outputs of the welds happening in Australia. “While there are more grades of rail available than there has ever been before, we can learn to perfect the weld for each kind.” Of interest also is that Holland may well also build a dedicated testing laboratory in Australia. According to Holland Rail Services Australia managing director Kevin J Piefer, the Australian branch currently uses a third party testing company with very high-end capabilities, with reports sent to the US team to analyse and review. “We’re very happy with what we have been receiving for support thus far, but having our own lab in Australia would be very beneficial,” he said “We want further control of the speed that we can deliver results and make changes in real time to our systems. “We believe that can be done successfully if we have our own lab set-up locally. Although with the amount of work to be done, we will definitely still need support from the other labs as we grow.”
