The most complex piece of equipment being designed in India, virtually?

How GE Transportation, now a Wabtec company, uses virtual reality to cross-collaborate with a global team to design Indian locomotives

The diesel electric locomotive being built by GE Transportation, now a Wabtec company, is perhaps the most complex piece of equipment that is being designed out of India, after the light combat aircraft.

A typical loco has roughly around 300,000 parts starting from the giant engines to radiators, not to mention the complex electronic units. All these have to be fitted into a truck (structure) which is all but 21.28 metres long, 3.2 metres wide, and 4.2 metres high.

The locomotive design needs a significant amount of customisation to meet the specifications given by the client, in this case the Indian Railways.  All this work involves some 7,000 drawings which basically means that an equal number of components have to go through some sort of alteration before going for production.

Effecting these complex changes with absolute accuracy and precision took Wabtec around just 18 months with the help of 100 design engineers from its technology centre in Bengaluru. They worked in closed collaboration with design experts from the company’s centre in Erie, Pennsylvania and also from Russia, Germany, France, Sweden and several other countries depending on their areas of expertise.

Other than its own deep engineering expertise, Wabtec, which now has around 18,000 locomotives running in many countries, used virtual reality (VR) technology to collaborate with a team flung across many geographies and work on the project real time to accomplish it in record time.

According to Gopal Madabhushi, India engineering leader at Wabtec, in the last five years or so, the company has done projects for various global customers in countries such as South Africa, Egypt, India and Kazakhstan, and design engineering activity for most of these projects are driven out of Bengaluru.

“We have our biggest technology centre located in Bengaluru, but there are several satellite centres located all across the world. The whole idea is how do you work with the team, explain the complexity in design, and get the alignment and the agreement. VR has helped us address these challenges. Collaborative VR has cut the time taken for a locomotive design from five years to less than two,” said Madabhushi. 

The VR lab is also helping in training the new joinees, especially engineers working at the manufacturing unit, to get trained on the complexities before starting to work on the shop floors.    

Although VR as a technology has been around for some time, its application has largely remained limited to entertainment. The Wabtec design teams changed all that, using the VR Labs in Bengaluru and Erie to give shape to the designs in a 3D environment, building the manufacturing-ready model through periodic design reviews.

The Bengaluru VR Lab was also used by Indian Railways experts to have an immersive experience of the designs and the ergonomics of the pilot cabs before the locos hit the track.

“For us, this is as much fun as gaming. But the difference is, while in a game there is a reset button if someone dies, there is no reset button for us, unfortunately,” said Harish Ganapathy, principal engineer at Wabtec who led the team of designers in India and globally.

To an outsider, the room that houses the VR Lab on the campus of Wabtech’s JFW Technology Centre in Bengaluru, does not look very unusual at first glance, aside from an 8 x 12 feet screen fixed to one side of the wall.

There are chairs positioned in several rows, a desktop computer, a wall-mounted monitor at the back facing the VR screen, and mikes and speakers on the ceiling to enable people inside to connect with people who are not located in a VR lab but want to participate in the review by watching on the shared screen.

There are a few VR headsets called “observer glasses” while there is a special one for the presenter, fitted with small antennas which capture the body movement of the presenter and react.

As the operator switches on the machine, giving it specific commands using the desktop computer placed nearby, what pops up on the screen is a 3D model of a 4,500HP diesel electric locomotive which you can enter wearing the VR headsets.

What makes the VR experience exceptional is the software that powers it. Provided by TechViz, a France-based supplier, the software enables the visualisation of 3D models from 3D applications without having to convert any data, seamlessly. That means it takes the design data from the computer and projects it, converting the data to 3D images.

One critical issue while building a loco is ensuring the required clearances between two pieces of equipment so that they don’t crash with each other during a jerk and also maintain the minimum ground clearance. This also helps during the manufacturing to make sure that someone can actually go to the place inside the loco and do welding.  

The VR software also provides a virtual tool which measures the clearances between moving components. It provides a camera which allows you to take a snapshot of an area which is not accessible to the operator to verify if there can be any accessibility issue during the actual manufacturing.

“When you have around 300,000 parts which have to come together, it means there are so many people working on it globally, there are various combinations, and when everything comes together and we start building the model, there could be interface issues. We want to avoid that and that’s where VR makes a huge difference,” said Dominique Malenfant, global technology officer at Wabtec.

During the design review, the teams use the VR tool to verify that there is a minimum clearance between the wall of the loco and the engine parts. All the simulation or calculation results are captured on the monitor which is placed on the back wall and used for subsequent reviews and actions before being confirmed for manufacturing readiness.

“Sometimes, we review things as simple as doing a match of all the holes. Because you are talking about a precision of less than 10th of an inch to exactly fix a component. To get to an accuracy of less than a quarter of an inch to accommodate all these 7,000 changes in a drawing is a herculean task,” said Ganapathy.

As part of the Indian Railways deal, GE Transportation (before it was spun off from GE and merged with Wabtec) was awarded a $2.5 billion contract to supply 1,000 diesel electric locomotives over 10 years, including 700 with an engine capacity of 4,500 HP and 300 locos with 6,000 HP engines.

So far, it has delivered around 160 locomotives with 4,500 HP engines and locomotives with 6,000 HP engines are undergoing testing now. While the first 50 locomotives were imported from the US, the rest are being manufactured by the company at its Marhowra plant in Bihar which was commissioned in September last year.   

Among the various design changes that the design team effected on the loco engine, a lot of them went on the pilot cabin, a fully air-conditioned unit which is fully insulated from water and, to a large extent, from noise. It provides the comfort of a high-end car including a heated front windshield defogger, a heater, mobile charging units and digital screens that capture all the relevant data including the health of the engines and various components.

In order to ensure that loco pilots have access to all the controlling units, the design team do something called “Jack or Ergo analyses”. “Jack” is basically a virtual pilot who is left in the cabin to test the ergonomics of the cabin, including the visibility of the signals through the windscreen and the ease with which the pilot can reach different controlling units and devices, including the emergency break.  

“We do all the ergonomics to make sure that when the pilot is sitting there, he does not have to run around in the cabin to get access to various controlling units but can focus completely on the task at hand,” said Ganapathy.