On March 18th, 2009 UIC in cooperation with UNIFE and Bombardier Transportation continued the successful series of Railenergy dissemination events with a workshop about Energy Efficient Components in Berlin.
40 participants, representing European Railway Undertakings and the European railway industry, attended this workshop providing an overview about the latest developments on the field of re-use of waste heat and on-board energy storage solutions. The workshop’s main focus was on the industries’ technological developments, whereas the first three workshops were about Railenergy’s theoretical background with the Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Energy Efficient Train Operation and energy saying potentials in the rail infrastructure.
A wide spectrum about Energy Efficient Components was presented by Markus Klohr, Marcus Lindemann and Christian Lauszat from Bombardier Transportation, Pierre Prenleloup from Saft Batteries S.A. and Jürgen Berger from Voith. Jürgen Becker got the full audience’s attention when proposing the “re-implementation” of the “steam-engine” for the railways. In this case the Railenergy consortium is not about to replace diesel and electric locomotives by steam-engines but to use the steam-engine technology for re-using waste heat on-board our trains. Following up the discussions of the Railenergy workshop “EE Train Operation” in Rome in October 2008 and the presentation about the Drivers Assistant System – HMI (Human Machine Interface) by Marcus Lindemann, all participants agreed on the high energy saving potentials by Energy Efficient train operation including the EE Driving and Traffic Flow Management.
The 4th Railenergy Workshop “EE Components” attracted mostly UIC members form the rolling stock departments such as SBB, DSB, DB, SNCF and SNCF.
The Railenergy workshops’ intention has been the dissemination of the intermediate project results on the one hand and the feedback by the UIC members to the project on the other hand. The Berlin workshop provided the chance to discuss about the industry’s developments in the joint working groups and further to discuss possible ways of implementation. At the end of the workshop the participants collected new research ideas for further railway research on the field of energy saving potentials. These ideas are used by UIC as input for the discussions within ERRAC and help UIC to shape the ERRAC Roadmap with the ideas and needs coming from the members.
The next Railenergy workshop will be held at the Deutsche Bahn Museum in Nuremberg (DB Verkehrsmuseum zu Nürnberg) on May 6th, 2009. This workshop will focus on Energy Efficient Traction with presentations about Energy Efficiency integration through modelling, Medium-Frequency Transformer, Superconducting Transformer and Diesel hybrid system with PM-machines and energy storage among others. The online registration for UIC members starts this week.