FEATURE
MALCOM DOBELL
maturing nicely Rolling-stock maintenance and remote condition monitoring
T
his is the fourth time that Rail Engineer has reported on London Business Conferences’ symposium on rolling stock maintenance, featuring Remote Condition Monitoring (issues 136, 148 and 171). This year was the eighth such conference and more than 120 speakers and delegates assembled in west London over two days in early December. Whilst the main topic was Remote Condition Monitoring (RCM) enabled by on-train sensors, wireless communications, cloud storage and analysis, there were a number of other interesting topics. Back in 2015, enthusiasts for RCM were clearly seeing themselves as evangelists - follow us and it will all be good, they said! Roll on four years and it is evident they were right. Many presentations showed the benefit of the RCM approach and industry leaders, including Thierry Fort, executive director of rolling stock engineering with SNCF Mobilities, and Johannes Emmelheinz, CEO of Siemens Mobility Customer Services, demonstrated the clear benefits to their organisations and to their customers. New trains come with this facility as a matter of course, but, increasingly, there is a demonstrable business case for retrofitting existing vehicles, as speakers from Latvia, India, Belgium and Saudi Arabia testified. There was also an increasing trend to recognise that “throwing a bunch of sensors” at a train is not necessarily the right answer. A clever data scientist, working with a rolling stock expert, ought to be able to extract similar information from a single sensor that a less-expert team might gain from several dozen. To an extent this is true of the wheel bearing sensors described below. They were installed to monitor bearing performance, then clever people found they also provided information about the wheels and the track.
Many speakers emphasised the importance of leadership, management and taking the people along on the journey, making the point that these are business change projects not IT projects. In 2015, this emphasis ranged from restrained to non-existent, so progress has been made. This report will examine some of the case studies, including managing wheels and axle bearings. It will also discuss some of the people issues and, as this conference always has some “and now for something completely different” moments, a selection of these will be described.
Wheels and axle bearings The condition of wheels and axle bearings can be assessed by the use of wayside equipment or by the use of axlebox sensors. Siemens, Voestalpine,
TrackIQ and Talgo are suppliers of the former whilst Perpetuum and SKF supply the latter. There has been much debate about the merits of the two techniques, and what follows are some conclusions from drawing on the points made by the above-mentioned suppliers, together with input from Chiltern Railways’ Simon Jarrett (pictured below) and Huddersfield University’s Professor Adam Bevan. Many factors determine when maintenance interventions are required on wheelsets, such as hollow profile, thin flange, flats, rolling contact fatigue and, sometimes, cavities or out-of-roundness. In addition, most bearing manufacturers specify a mileage limit between overhauls. The traditional method of checking wheels is by measuring profiles during inspection in depots; something that is labour intensive and not especially accurate. Automated systems have been available for over 20 years. Bearings, generally, were overhauled at the specified interval and occasional failures were detected using hot axlebox detectors (HABD). A hot wheel bearing is, at best, hours from failure, so a train with
Rail Engineer | Issue 181 | Jan/Feb 2020
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