Application of Reliability Centered Maintenance for Electric Locomotive Right from Design Phase

Locomotives are designed for a long service life where maintenance cost contributes significantly to overall life cycle cost (LCC). In addition to maintenance, LCC can be further augmented by penalties levied by the operator due to reliability and availability losses. Preventive maintenance tasks fall short in achieving the anticipated reliability performance envisioned during the design phase, necessitating the adoption of a reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) approach. The classical RCM methodology is mainly oriented towards refining the maintenance program to improve product/functional reliability. In addition to classical methodology, this work addresses critical field failures by identifying improvement actions right from the design phase. These actions include design improvements, additional validation tests, manufacturing and maintenance process improvements etc. Also, prognostic and diagnostic capabilities have been added in the train monitoring system with a goal to detect the onset of an impending failure and reducing system downtime, respectively. The proposed approach has been implemented on a Wide gauge Alternating current electric Goods class 12 (WAG-12B) family of locomotives. The effectiveness of RCM philosophy implementation to meet the reliability target is not yet validated as the first locomotive was under the functional validation phase at the time of this manuscript preparation. Field failure data will be collected during the operational phase of the locomotives and results will be reported in future to validate RCM effectiveness for WAG-12B locomotives.