“The motor was not the origin”: Confiabilidad 360° at Latinrieles Argentina

Christian Mena San Juan, general manager of Truck Energy, presented Confiabilidad 360° at Latinrieles Argentina, the 21st Congress and Exhibition of the Rail Industry, held from 3 to 5 September in Puerto Iguazú, in the province of Misiones. It is the third Latinrieles congress this year at which he has spoken, after Antofagasta in May and Lima in June.

The talk focused on a case the slide sums up in a single line: the real discovery was that the motor was not the origin. For years it was taken for granted that the fault lay in the traction motor, and every time a failure was analyzed on its own, the motor ended up blamed again. When the failures were analyzed together, the whole chain came into view.

In the desert, where the operation makes the equipment vibrate far too much, the sequence does not start in the motor. It runs from the operation to the track, from the track to the bogie, from the bogie to the vibration, from the vibration to the motor, and ends in an open interpole. The electrical failure was the consequence; the cause lay in the system.

“If we fix our eyes on the motor alone, we will never solve the failure,” he told the audience.

That is the idea at the heart of Confiabilidad 360°: not just intervening on the component, but interpreting the whole operation. As he explained in the talk, the method has already been tested in both southern and northern Chile, under completely different geographical conditions and with different failures.

The open interpole at the end of that chain is one of the two failure modes analyzed in the «Mejora de interpolos» (interpole improvement) report, published in Truck Energy's library, La Biblioteca, in Spanish. It sets out the two readings of its cause, a defect in the conductor material or mechanical stress during operation, and how a dispute like that gets settled: by implementing and measuring.

Latinrieles is the Argentine rail industry's congress, organized by Rieles Group since 2006. This edition was held in Misiones, hosted by the Tren de la Selva railway, with more than forty Argentine and international companies and a program of more than thirty talks on infrastructure, rolling stock, safety, management and new technologies.

The video is a fifty-second excerpt from the talk, with English and Spanish subtitles.