What does it take to turn an ageing diesel locomotive into a 3,100-horsepower hydrogen machine? For Concord Control Systems, it involves much more than replacing a diesel engine with a fuel cell.
The company is attempting to bring together a hydrogen fuel cell, battery, power electronics, control and diagnostic systems, cooling and safety architecture inside an existing locomotive — and then prove that the entire system can withstand the demands of railway operations.
Concord is undertaking the project for NTPC, which will supply the hydrogen for the locomotive.
In an interaction with the , Gaurav Lath, joint managing director of Concord Control Systems, explains how the locomotive is being built, the engineering and safety challenges involved, what the company has learnt from its battery locomotive and where it sees hydrogen fitting into India’s increasingly electrified railway network.
What exactly is Concord building, and how does the conversion of the diesel locomotive work?
For us, this is more a technology project, not only from a supply-order perspective. We are building a hybrid hydrogen locomotive with a total combined capacity of 3,100 HP, and the hydrogen will be supplied by NTPC.
This is a high-capacity hydrogen-hybrid locomotive project and more importantly a significant technology-integration exercise for us.
The diesel locomotive shifted to our works in Bengaluru, is currently undergoing retrofit integration and technology upgradation.
Our strength lies in railway electronics, control systems, diagnostics, embedded engineering and system integration. Bringing all this together into one package is what this project is about.
Once the diesel platform comes into your works, what is the new propulsion architecture that you are putting around it?
A hybrid hydrogen locomotive is a complex system in which a fuel cell, battery, power electronics, control system, cooling system, safety system and locomotive interface all work together. A hybrid solution is a combination of a hydrogen fuel cell and battery.
To make a hydrogen locomotive, we require a complete energy and propulsion ecosystem to be integrated into a single operating locomotive, and Concord’s core capability is in bringing these multiple systems together through railway grade system integration and control engineering.
The challenge is to integrate everything seamlessly into a single moving machine. Our railway electronics, control systems, diagnostics and embedded engineering are already being used for locomotive applications.
The hydrogen project brings all of these capabilities together with the alternative-energy system.
What makes that integration particularly difficult in a railway application?
Since it has to function on a railway application, safety becomes a critical aspect of the entire offering. We have to be very cautious while designing the entire architecture.
Hydrogen protection, ventilation, shut-off, thermal protection — everything has to be designed in line with the safety and critical-use-case requirements of railway applications.
The final stage is to validate it in the field in harsh environments and conditions and perform long duty cycles. It is not just a product development for us but an end-to-end systems engineering exercise.
You have already been running a battery locomotive for about a year. What has that experience taught you that is now feeding into the hydrogen project?
There have been multiple learnings, and the entire decarbonisation and mobility piece that Concord is today working on has also been strengthened by the experience gained from that conversion.
We could understand how the energy system and integration would function in an alternative-fuel scenario. While running it over a year, we have also assimilated a lot of data and understanding on how the machine reacts to real operating environments and how we should design our products.
That experience is important because railway applications are very different from controlled environments. You have to understand how the machine behaves over time and under actual operating conditions. Our battery locomotive has given us that experience, and now we are applying those learnings to the hydrogen platform.
Why does the retrofit approach matter when the industry is already moving rapidly towards electrification?
Locomotives are long-life assets and can remain in service for decades. So there is an opportunity to upgrade the technology of an existing locomotive and give it a new life.
A properly engineered retrofit can materially extend the useful life of the existing locomotive platform while giving it a completely modern propulsion and control architecture.
The objective is to achieve the performance, reliability and technology characteristics expected from a modern hydrogen fuel-cell hybrid locomotive, while effectively utilising an existing railway asset.
India has already made a lot of progress in rail electrification. At the same time, hydrogen is a very relevant technology and it can make economic as well as operational sense in specific applications.
Over a period of time, I think hydrogen can replace diesel in certain applications. We are not saying hydrogen has to replace electrification everywhere. It is about identifying the applications where hydrogen makes economic and operational sense.
Where does Concord want to take this technology after the 3,100-HP project?
For us, this is more than one supply order. Our strength is R&D, railway electronics, control systems, diagnostics, embedded engineering and system integration.
We require a complete energy and propulsion ecosystem to be integrated into a single operating locomotive, and our objective is to build deep in-house capability around the integration, control, diagnostics and railway engineering required for such platforms.
As per the tender conditions, we are positioned to complete the project by early the next financial year. We are in sync with this and are following a very structured project timeline.
The project is another step in taking the learnings we have built through alternative-energy locomotives and converting them into a complete technology capability.
Over the longer term, we see this capability becoming relevant across a wider spectrum of zero-emission and alternative-energy railway applications, subject of course to successful validation, operating economics and customer requirements.