Pittsburgh-based Wabtec Corp., a technology supplier for the freight and transit rail industries, recently opened an engineering lab in Bengaluru, India. The lab, its largest in India, will be dedicated to rail component design and performance.
The Wabtec India Technology Center includes 12,000-square-feet of operations center and office space, and 30,000-square-feet for a test lab. More than 30 complex mechanical, electrical and propulsion related custom built test rigs are located in the facility, and the company plans to add more over the next three months.
The facility is part of the company’s strategy to develop sustainable solutions for customers worldwide and will be used to test performance, predict the service life of components, validate design improvements, and evaluate failures.
“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,” Gopal Madabhushi, Wabtec corporate vice president, said. “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.”
Wabtec has an Indian presence in both the freight and transit rail industries. It has supplied more than 300 locomotives to Indian Railways.