2007-10-22 - The ABB railway product portfolio has been extended a new vacuum circuit breaker for rolling stock applications. As typical for ABB, a strong cooperation with various ABB units in different countries made this project a success. Philippe Stefanutti, project leader of this development, would like to underline, that the international collaboration, which took place between India (Nashik), Italy (Dalmine), Germany (Ratingen) and, the leading Technology Center in Switzerland (ABB Sécheron, Geneva) can be considered as the key to the fast progress in the project. The twenty months of development time, during which the different units co-operated successfully, led rapidly to a first customer order.
The Product:
The ACTrac is a circuit breaker that assures the safety of electric drives in railway vehicles. This circuit breaker completes the ABB traction package, comprising traction transformers, converters and drives. The development focused on simplicity, reliability, longevity and minimal maintenance costs, the key features for our competitive advantage. Furthermore, Robert von Boehn-Buchholz, Product Manager stressed the importance to assure compatibility to previous competitor products for retrofitting and a maximum coverage for customer and system requirements. This was achieved under the employment of newest technologies, like modern control electronics and an innovative magnetic actuation technology.
Research and Development:
The ACTrac is a completely new product development. Customer requirements were analyzed, competitor products were observed to concentrate on the important and necessary development tasks. It combined existing ABB standard components (e.g. control electronics, vacuum switching chamber-pole with integrated functions), with as little adjustment work as possible. It included innovative elements like the new weight and cost-optimized magnet drive mechanism ("single coil actuator") which could serve in the future as well for other medium voltage products. All mandatory type tests for product validation were accomplished successfully. In addition, it should be underlined, that the endurance test requirements have been largely surpassed with 250'000 (C-O) operations.
Production:
Philippe Haeberlin, the responsible design engineer, explains that the basis of a modular design with focus on “Design for Manufacturing” offers largest flexibility and cost efficiency concerning the organization of the mounting process.
Customers & Sales:
Due to its expertise in railway applications, ABB Sécheron can market this new circuit-breaker through existing sales channels. Close contacts with rolling stock manufacturers such as Bombardier Transportation, Stadler Rail, Alstom Transport, CAF, Siemens Transportation or Skoda can be used in order to sell all ABB products of the railway customer segment, including the new ACTrac.