Wabtec opens its largest engineering hub in India

Wabtec Corp. opened a new global engineering lab in India for rail component design and validation.

The new facility in Bengaluru is Wabtec’s largest lab in India and adds to the company’s growing engineering presence in the country.

The facility was inaugurated by Eric Gebhardt, Wabtec’s executive vice president and chief technology officer and Dr. Sujatha Narayan, regional senior vice president, Wabtec India, along with key members from the engineering team.

Wabtec opens its largest engineering lab in India.

“India site is an important engineering hub for our company,” said Gebhardt. “The Wabtec India Technology Center and this global engineering lab are vital to our strategy to develop sustainable solutions for our customers worldwide.”

This engineering lab has a 30 000 sq. ft. test lab area and 12 000 sq. ft. for an operations center and office space. The facility 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,” said 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 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 Corp. “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 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 2000 cars in Metro projects. The company employs 2700 people in India with large engineering bases in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.