Overview
Rail is a fundamental service for modern societies and the backbone of a sustainable transport system. To meet the numerous challenges ahead, the global rail sector must increasingly rely on the emerging disruptive technologies such as advanced robotics, 3-D printing, high computing power and connectivity, etc. which are integrated with analytical and cognitive technologies that enable machine-to-machine and machine-to-human communication.
On top comes the pressure to reduce energy consumption, pollution and the consumption of other resources. Mastering the breakthrough developments of new technologies is of capital importance for the railway industry to deliver smart and efficient solutions. Indeed, essential to the growth of the rail industry is the reduction of the overall life cycle exploitation costs of all rail sub-systems. The traction drive sub-system is one of the main sub-systems of a train as it moves the train converting energy from an electrical source (directly or via a chemical source) into a mechanical one. RECET4Rail will focus on the following new technologies for the traction drive sub-system:
- development of design approaches, end-to-end conception time evaluation and feasibility/performance study of 3D printing technologies for new traction’s components use cases;
- dynamic wireless power transfer system sizing for actual city profiles focused on opportunistic charging;
- improving the understanding of the robustness and reliability of high voltage SiC modules; and
- development of smart maintenance approaches enabled by predictive analytics, trained on big data.
RECET4Rail will provide essential knowledge that will lead to future improvement of the high TRL level S2R traction demonstrations on trains done by the S2R Members, preparing also future S2R key work on domains like digitalisation applied to traction, environmental sustainability (especially devising carbon free traction systems) or reinforcement of standardisation to lower complexity and costs.