UIC and the Railenergy partners UNIFE and Ansaldo Breda hosted the sixth Railenergy Workshop “EE Topologies” in Naples, being the last workshop in the first series of dissemination events for the time being. The general intention of the Railenergy workshops has been firstly to ensure the dissemination of the intermediate Railenergy results as widely as possible, secondly to get a feedback form the operators and infrastructure managers about the tools and devices developed and thirdly to regularly check if Railenergy is “on track”.
The main focus of the 6th workshop held on July 9th, 2009 and chaired by Enno Wiebe, was on the optimization of electrical equipment topologies. The subproject 6 “EE Topologies” has been focusing on the management of all the major equipment, related to the complete power train, auxiliary systems and cooling devices. A more efficient on-board management of energy represents a significant contribution to the overall energy efficiency of a transport system.
30 UIC and UNIFE members including the Railenergy project partners attended the meeting in Naples and the following joint working groups in order to be informed about the Modelling approach in SP 6 presented by Marco Giannettoni from the University of Genoa, Efficiency within the on-board traction system by Nappo Ciro (AnsaldoBreda), Optimised Energy Architecture and Operation for Auxiliary Systems by Peter Grippi from Faiveley Transport Italia, and finally about Cooling Circuits by Pietro Venanzio from AnsaldoBreda.
Beside direct questions related to the presentation and their technical contents, UIC members in particular were asked to critically discuss the topics and devices presented and the energy saving potentials shown. The joint working groups’ intention was to discuss the presentations in detail and to enhance direct discussions among partners from the operators and the manufacturers. Finally, after getting a broad overview about SP 6 and the discussions with the manufacturers, the operators worked out their specific feedback.
The workshop was concluded with the operators’ statement asking to have more information about reliability, availability, maintenance and safety. Furthermore the manufacturers were asked to put a strong focus on environmental aspects like environmental friendly devices and the according reduction of CO2 emissions.
The Railenergy workshops have been so far a good platform to discuss about further research needs and ideas being later forwarded to ERRAC. During the SP 6 workshop the reduction of mass was a topic intensively discussed among the participants. The reduction of mass, meaning lighter trains, leads to great energy saving potentials. The members of the workshops agreed on exploiting these potentials in future as lighter trains ensure higher energy efficiency on the one hand and lower impacting on the rail infrastructure on the other hand.
After the first series of Railenergy workshops successfully came to an end and all Railenergy subprojects had been now disseminated, UIC and UNIFE will chose the highlights (best-of) of the workshops and put them on the agenda for the Railenergy conference at the Energy Efficiency Days 2009 on September 23rd, 2009 – the first day of the Energy Efficiency Days 2009. The most promising Railenergy technologies will be presented at this conference. The results of SP 6 will be as presented among the other outstanding Railenergy achievements.
For more information about Railenergy visit the website www.railenergy.org for information about the Energy Efficiency Days in Tours on September 23rd – 26th, 2009 go to www.energy-efficiency-days.org or contact Enno Wiebe at wiebe at uic.org.
Furthermore the Railenergy team has the great pleasure to announce the second series of workshops starting with “Energy Efficient Train Operation” on December 1st, 2009 and “Energy Efficient Management” on December 2nd, 2009. Both workshops will be held in Prague/ Czech Republic. We invite you to block the dates already in your agenda.
