Wabtec UK
Predicting HVAC Lockouts
Wabtec Faiveley UK have had a Full-Service Maintenance Contract since 2013 for legacy (30-year-old) HVAC systems on a UK fleet of 30x 9 car Intercity Trains.
Since this time, the Field Services (FS) and Technical Service Solutions (TSS) teams have increased Availability from 7% to 98% and Reliability from 10 Months to 28 Months by installing RCM and providing dedicated on-depot support.
Despite this increase in availability and reliability, the module maximum design temperature is 28°C (82.4°F) and therefore modules can still struggle to perform during the peak of Summer. Summer of
2018 saw many HVAC systems ‘locking out’ and disabling cooling as a mechanism for protecting the compressor in adverse conditions.
In Spring of 2019 in preparation for another hot summer period, the TSS team set out to use the previous summer’s dataset intelligently in order to reduce the adverse effect of compressor lockouts. If a lockout could be predicted with enough time to act, a module could be investigated or replaced pre-emptively in order to reduce the impact on cooling performance.
