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On track for a rail revolution
The Wind Business is looking at a new way of transporting its nacelles and hubs, as it adapts to the
specifics of the North American Market
The advance of Wind in the North American
market is throwing up some unusual challenges
for the Business, and changing the way it goes
about its work. One such is nacelle and hub
transport: for the first time Wind is proposing to
transport nacelles and hubs by rail rather than
road.
The move, somewhat forced upon the
Business by logistical conditions, is providing
valuable experience that could be applied
beyond North America – but first things first.
Wind is used to using trucks for nacelle
transport, but with the ECO 100 nacelle
weighing some 84,000 kg, the only North
American standard-sized truck appropriate is a
19-axle truck, of which there are only a few dozen available on the continent. The North American preference for
moving heavy loads is by rail, and so Wind is conducting its first foray into rail transport.
Using rail has a number of logistical advantages, not least of which is the possibility of moving several nacelles in
one go quickly and reliably across considerable distances. Another plus is the ability to carry up to three hubs per
railcar, resulting in significant transportation savings. The challenge is to make sure that the vibration of the
journey does not negatively affect the performance of the nacelle and hub. To accomplish this, specialist fixtures
were designed to hold the nacelles securely in place on the train cars.
The rail experiment began when Wind
won two projects in Canada. For Project
I, nacelles and hubs are expected to be
shipped to site from the Bunuel factory in
Spain, and for the second, Project II, the
nacelles and hubs are expected to come
from the nacelle assembly plant in
Amarillo, Texas US. These are
considerable distances, so the
economics and practicality of rail became
apparent.
The nacelles and hubs from Spain will be
delivered to a St Lawrence River port and
transported down the Great Lakes to
Thunder Bay, Ontario, before transferring to
rail for the onward journey to Medicine Hat.
For the second project, the nacelles and
hubs will leave the Amarillo factory on rail
wagons as the plant has its own spur to the
rail network.
In preparation for the projects, the teams involved began by employing a rail specialist company to produce the
fittings needed to attach the nacelles and hubs to the rail cars. Computer-aided simulations of the rail conditions
and analysis of the impact of those conditions on the nacelle structure were performed by the Wind Innovation
team in Barcelona. The simulation studies had shown that the structure needed to be prepared for rail transport
to avoid stress points.
Next came the “physical validation tests”, in other words, the nacelle and hub would need to be put on a train and
the performance evaluated before and after the journey.
The nacelle structure, gearbox, generator and hub were fitted with accelerometers and strain gauges. The
gearbox was then inspected by a third-party entity in order to establish the base condition of the gears and
bearings. The gearbox and generator were then spun in order to capture the frequency response of those
components at a critical speed. With these measurements taken, it was time to put the nacelle on the tracks.
Starting from the plant in Amarillo Texas, the nacelle and hub were loaded onto a rail car and transported twice
round a circular route encompassing Boise City, Oklahoma; Trinidad, Colorado; and back to Amarillo, Texas – a
journey of a little over 1,900 km.
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10/3/2013https://online.alstom.com/News/Newsletters/BlueLink/Pages/On-track-for-a-rail-revolutio...
