Improve fleet efficiency and reliability with innovative railway solutions and services from SKF. Discover how new railway condition monitoring technology and condition-based maintenance can help you extend maintenance intervals. SKF railway specific products and services help you obtain lower life cycle costs by letting you use bearings to their full potential.
Time- and mileage-based maintenance remain the most common methods of inspection and repair of rolling stock. This means critical components are maintained based on distances travelled, regardless of their level of deterioration. These approaches are, however, time-consuming and fail to secure that operators can make better use of their components’ potential service life.
Our condition monitoring solutions provide real-time updates of the condition of your bearings and other components. This way, you can avoid taking bearings out of service too early, and instead removing them only when necessary. Through advanced diagnostics, you can access early warnings about any deterioration in bearing condition. In turn, you have sufficient time to plan maintenance before failures can occur.
Drive systems such as gearboxes and traction motors for trains must be powerful, sustainable, cost-effective and require minimal maintenance. These requirements are steadily getting more important because of increasingly long maintenance intervals and developments in weight of railway vehicles.
Traction motors must deliver high speeds and handle shock loads, but also resist low load conditions for example in coasting or cruise control mode. Additionally, sensitivity towards electrical discharge contributes to unique design challenges in traction motor bearings.
Gearbox design requirements also place high demands on gearbox bearings and bearing arrangements. Specific challenges include wide operating temperature ranges, high shock loads, and increasing loads overall in combination with the drive to reduce friction within the gearbox and lower energy consumption.
We cooperate with customers and operators to implement the latest requirements, and to innovate and deliver high quality products and services. We have long experience with bearing designs for railway drives. SKF drive system bearings are designed to cope with high levels of contamination and perform in humid environments, as well as in conditions with variations in speed, temperature, load, vibration, and shocks. Beside developing new innovative solutions, we also offer a preferred range of commonly used bearings and bearing units with good field experience, as well as references for drive systems to make it easier to choose the right products in the design phase.
From providing design expertise and advanced wheelset bearings, to installing lubrication systems, validating safety requirements, mounting bearings and more – we offer various railway solutions worldwide. This includes our core competence in wheelset and drive system bearing design, as well as a global network of production, service and remanufacturing centres. Supported by a vast network of sales, application and service engineers, we help to increase railway vehicle safety, reliability, efficiency and extend service intervals.
