WABTEC Design Competition

Figure 1. The Team and Professor at the BJC for the Competition

The Intro to Engineering Design course is required for engineering majors at Penn State and includes learning the design process, working in teams, and exposure to SolidWorks. During the course, there is a sponsored competition that teams of four compete in every semester. When I took this course in spring 2019, the design competition, sponsored by WABTEC, was to design a regional lightweight locomotive that is more efficient and applicable for several regions, countries, and customers. For reference, WABTEC is a company based in Pittsburgh, PA that manufactures a range of products for locomotives, freight cars and passenger transit vehicles.

Figure 2. Customer Needs

Our team goal was to design a locomotive that would increase the people capacity per train in central Asia. This specific location was decided based on the high volume of pollution and overpopulation in this region.

Figure 3. Initial Rough Sketch of Train Model

After the deadline of the project, we present on our topic along with the rest of the groups in the class. A vote is conducted for which team should represent the class's best work and attend the judging competition by WABTEC officials in the Bryce Jordan Center (BJC) against the other sections. My classmates decided that my team had the best design, so we created a poster to highlight the key aspects of our design. It was recommended in the poster that the energy source include solar panels in some form (a hybrid or pure renewable energy) because the environment these trains would be implemented is perfect for such a design (Figure 6). Our posted also illustrated how there would be a 90% increase in passengers on the trains with our new design along with a 40% decrease in cost (Figure 2).

Figure 4. Final Prototype Side View

Figure 5. Final Prototype Isometric View

Figure 6. Example of Solar Paneled Railroad Tracks

Figure 7. Image of Train in Bangladesh