Engineers across the globe will leverage the world-class facility
Pittsburg-headquartered Wabtec Corporation (NYSE: WAB), a leading technology supplier for the freight and transit rail industries and a leading equipment manufacturer in India, has inaugurated a world-class global engineering lab at Bengaluru to enable rail component design and performance. The new facility is Wabtec’s largest lab in India and adds to the company’s growing engineering presence in the country.
“India site is an important engineering hub for our company,” said Eric Gebhardt, Executive Vice President who inaugurated the facility on 13 Oct 2021 along with Chief Technology Officer Dr. Sujatha Narayan, Regional Senior Vice President, Wabtec India, and key members from the Engineering team.
“The Wabtec India Technology Center and this global engineering lab are vital to our strategy to develop sustainable solutions for our customers worldwide,” said Gebhardt
The 30,000-sq ft engineering lab houses more than 30 complex mechanical, electrical and propulsion related custom built test rigs. The objective of the facility is to characterize the performance, understand the failures, predict the service life of components, and validate design improvements.
“This new lab provides our team in Bengaluru the resources to design and validate products for our global and regional markets,” added Narayan.
Wabtec is planning to relocate and add test rigs to the new facility over the next three months. Some of the test equipment, such as the Resonance Type 1500 KN Fatigue rig, are unique and one of its kind in India. Engineers across the globe will leverage these labs for establishing dynamic characterization, comparing physical and virtual test results, component validations and development work.
“The Global Engineering Lab allows us to conduct ‘Smart Validation’ of products in the most efficient way. This approach enables us to do component-level testing versus system level testing,” said Gopal Madabhushi, Corporate Vice President, Wabtec Corporation.
“The lab’s innovative rigs allow us to design for various operating conditions, gain insights on performance in shortest possible time, which supports successful product launches,” he said.
Wabtec is one of the largest rail equipment manufacturers in India. With two large business entities in freight and transit rail, the company has supplied more than 300 locomotives to Indian Railways and have an installed base of subsystems in over 2,000 cars in Metro projects. The company employs 2,700 people in India with large engineering bases in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
Wabtec is a leading global provider of equipment, systems, digital solutions and value-added services for the freight and transit rail industries, as well as the mining, marine and industrial markets. Wabtec has been a leader in the rail industry for over 150 years and has a vision to achieve a zero-emission rail system in the U.S. and worldwide. #technology #investment #manufacturing #projects /fiinews.com
