Good news has recently been announce from the NGC Rail Transportation Business Unit: NGC has won a bid to provide 672 gearboxes for Barcelona’s metro lines 1 and 3. The gearbox to be provided is a PDM490-type twin-stage metro gearbox.
Barcelona is Spain’s second largest city, and world-renowned as a tourist destination for its stunning Mediterranean scenery, as well as its rich history and culture. It is also one of the most densely-populated cities in the world. The selected PDM490 metro gearbox has been widely adopted across the metro lines of Santiago, Chile, Amsterdam, Netherlands, the Loop Line in Singapore, Guadalajara, Mexico, and other urban metro lines.
The PDM490 gearbox is produced in strict accordance with the customer’s specified requirements, benefits from NGC’s many years of design and production experience, and thus is a more developed and upgraded metro gearbox. To satisfy requirements including precision, light weight, and high reliability, this NGC-developed metro gearbox adopts advanced gear modification technologies. These greatly improve the carrying capacity of the gear and significantly reduce noise, meeting the customers’ stringent requirements for both service life and noise levels. NGC has also adopted nonlinear finite element analysis techniques to lighten the weight of the gearbox chassis and thereby improve its power density. During the gearbox design process, Barcelona’s harsh climatic conditions were fully considered, adopting highly durable housing materials and an improved lubricant oil circuit design to endow this gearbox with the capacity to start and run under ambient temperatures of -20℃ to 50℃. This gearbox features advantages of high power density, high bearing capacity, low noise, high reliability, and easy maintenance. The design life of the key parts of this gearbox is as great as 40 years, while its maintenance-free service life is as high as 1.2 million kilometers.
As a global expert & solution provider of gearboxes and power transmissions, NGC has performed in-depth research and practice in transmission technologies for more than 50 years. NGC’s rail vehicle transmission products have been widely used in metros, trams, inter-city rail lines, high-speed rail vehicles, conventional locomotives, and other applications, and the company has successively established long-term partnerships with several well-known manufacturers across China and around the world. NGC adheres to a “zero-defect principle and process”, and the company is dedicated to providing safe, reliable, and quiet gear products for customers around the world, and to providing a full range of rail transit gear solutions. NGC has also obtained quality system certifications for the ISO/TS 22163:2017 (International Railway Industry Standard) and CRCC railway product certification.
Thanks to NGC’s optimization of gearbox design technology, its excellent seals, and effective control of the production process, NGC’s rail vehicle gearboxes feature greater environmental friendliness. At present, NGC has nearly 35,000 sets of metro gearboxes operating across China, North America, South America, Europe, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and other areas, and the company’s products have received strong positive feedback from their users.