RT-LAB Technology Rides the Bombardier JetTrain

As Bombardier Transportation recently unveiled their state-of-the-art JetTrain, an RT-LAB industrial embedded controller was on-board providing the advanced control for the Pratt & Whitney gas-turbine engine, derived from the PW 150 jet engine. This combination makes the JetTrain, described by Pierre Lortie, President and Chief Operating Officer of Bombardier Transportation as "game-changing technology", the first 150-mile per hour (240 km/h) non-electric high-speed rail locomotive designed for the North American market.

RT-LAB allowed engineers at Pratt & Whitney Canada (PWC) to rapidly build and test the controllers in order to meet some very demanding design constraints:

• JetTrain technology was designed to offer the speed and acceleration of electric trains without the cost of building electrified rail lines. Among its many performance features, the locomotive is 20 per cent lighter than a conventional diesel unit with twice the acceleration and has undergone extensive low and high-speed dynamic testing as part of the Bombardier/FRA Research & Development program.
  
  
• Not only did the JetTrain need to meet all North American standards for high-speed rail, it had to be significantly more environmentally friendly than other forms of mass transportation.
  
  
• Under operating conditions, JetTrain greenhouse gas emissions will be at least 30 per cent lower than from a conventional diesel. As well, the JetTrain locomotive is quieter than FRA noise standards at all operating speeds.

The controller was designed and tested using MATRIXx, with RT-LAB as the real-time platform for Hardware-in-the-Loop testing, it was a very easy step to take the controller in the RT-LAB simulator and test it with the gas-turbine engine in the test cell. And, because of the robustness of the RT-LAB platform, it made logical sense to simply install it in the JetTrain itself, saving a considerable amount of rework, time and cost.

"RT-LAB allowed us to quickly develop and test the gas-turbine control system in order to meet an aggressive project schedule."
Serge Daudelin
Senior Project Engineer
Industrial Programs, Pratt & Whitney Canada