Specialized locomotives for Indian and international customers

By Niraj M Wanikar, Chief Editor, CNCTimes.com, 2016-09-06 14:50:00

SAN Engineering and Locomotive was established in 1969 to design and manufacture locomotives for multiple industries within India’s burgeoning economy. To date, the company has designed, built and commissioned more than 900 locomotives for Indian core sector industries including Indian Railways. These locomotives are primarily used for shunting operations, such as hauling heavy loads over difficult terrain.

SAN specializes in delivering custom-designed locomotives to meet the site-specific requirements of its industrial customers. Typically, these powerful locomotives range in size from 25 kilowatts (kW) to 1600 kW and are specially designed to haul maximum loads like those required in power generation, cement, port, refineries, steel plants and others.

In keeping with its strategy of delivering customized locomotives and special rail vehicles, the company’s engineering staff was charged with implementing a design process that was able to meet the unique and technically demanding requirements of each of its customers while at the same time enabling the company to earn a reasonable return each time it delivered a finished product. In other words, like all companies that provide custom-designed products, SAN needed to walk the thin and challenging line of providing a speciality deliverable at a reasonable cost.

Migrating from 2D TO 3D design
To address this demanding challenge, SAN’s engineers realized that they needed to reevaluate their design process to see whether the latest CAD and CAE technology could provide them with the flexibilty they needed to deal with the varieties inherent in their business. In essence, SAN wanted to rethink the way it designed a unique product for each of its customers.

The company’s design group started by using Siemens PLM oftware’s Solid Edge® software on several smaller projects. The early results were encouraging and prompted the company to move forward and fully implement Solid Edge as the CAD and CAE solutions for its new 3D design process. However, before doing this, the company wanted to make certain that all of its engineers, as well as its senior executives, were trained on the new software.

After the training was complete, SAN began to implement its process innovations in earnest. One of the most important innovations was to establish a standard practice for design and drafting. More specifically, the company wanted to use standard parts for the bought-out items and hardware that were used in its custom locomotives. The goal here was to enable all of the company’s engineers to use a systematic design methodology that minmized the needs for newly designed components/parts.

Another important innovation was the use of standardized design templates that would streamline the practice of custom design and drafting. S. K. Ramachandra, associate vice president of Research and Development at SAN Engineering, explains, “The intent was to enable the company’s designers to follow a standard design method that would enable them to eliminate the ambiguity associated with reading, using and modifying design models/drawings that had been created by other engineers earlier in the custom-design process.”

Superb results with Solid Edge
The company’s new design process, driven by Solid Edge, enables SAN’s engineers to see how their designs will behave in assembly and in operation early in the product development cycle before resources and physical investments are expended. “Solid Edge is especially adept at enabling designers to assess the behavior of rigid parts, adjustable parts, rigid assembly and adjustable assembly functionality,” says Ramachandra.

Solid Edge also enables the engineering team to model certain components, such as springs, flanges and fasteners, as variables. Ramachandra notes, “This design approach is highly valuable because it allows designers to simply change a variable component in model, test it and proceed through whatever number of iterations are required without having to model the entire part over and over.”

3D modeling helps the engineering team to detect the interferences between parts, locate the design’s faults and easily correct the model before its related drawing is released. Just as importantly, even though time is spent performing the 3D modeling, drafting time is reduced almost by half since Solid Edge is able to automatically generate 2D drawings from 3D models. In addition, the opportunity to re-use these models and assemblies in other projects has enabled the company to dramatically reduce its design times.

The company also benefits because generated drawings are highly accurate – and because the revision manager and link management tools of Solid Edge enable the engineering team to manage their assemblies and drawings much more efficiently. Similarly, Solid Edge facilitates automatic bill of material generation, which helps to speed up the drafting process while ensuring that no component is left without itemization. This also reduces the time required for checking.

“We are quite pleased with the advantages that Solid Edge has afforded us,” says Ramachandra. “These advantages have given us an exceptionally improved development process and have persuaded us to implement all of our locomotive design activities on the Solid Edge 3D platform.”

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