The supplier consortium consists of SMS group and Niles-Simmons-Hegenscheidt, Chemnitz (NSH), Germany. SMS provides the buildings including equipment, infrastructure, water management and transformer station. Furthermore, SMS supplies the wheel rolling line with billet saw plant, billet storage and billet heating machine. Wheels, QT system and mechanical contour machining units are provided by NSH.
It is the world’s first turnkey installation producing fully contour-machined railroad wheels. The bars up to 9 m long produced in the continuous casting process are first shortened by two billet saws to the length designated for the respective wheels. Behind the sawing machine the billets are taken over by an automatic gantry crane and put into temporary billet storage. An infeed conveyor transports the billets to the rotary hearth furnace which homogeneously heats up to 22 t of billets per hour before forging. The furnace may be operated with either propane or natural gas. After heating, another conveyor transports the hot billets to the forging line.
In a second step, the billet is formed in a press with a pressing force of 9,000 t to a wheel blank and is then rolled out in an automated process on the wheel rolling machine (type DRAW 1250) to its full diameter. In the process, 13 CNC-controlled axes act simultaneously on a vertically rotating wheel. The rolling process is followed by piercing of the pin bore and final shaping of the web area, the so-called dishing. This process takes place in two stages in the piercing and dishing press with a pressing force of 5,000 t. After measuring the wheel, the contours are machined. In a final step, a testing system makes sure that the quality standards of RDSO (Research Design and Standards Organization of the Ministry of Railways, Government of India) are met.
This greenfield project is to contribute to advancing India’s further expansion of the transport infrastructure and to increase the independence from imported railroad wheels. “The line produces so many wheels that Indian Railways could be supplied for many decades“, Martin J. Kunz, Vice President of Forging Technology Division is sure.
_{(Source: SMS group)}