For the SBB workshops in Bellinzona, responsible for the maintenance of the Swiss railway fleet, we have recently installed a new painting booth with an innovative lateral extraction system .
If the train has always been synonymous with movement, speed and innovation, the new system fully reflects the soul of the sector, allowing flexibility, speed and sustainability.
FFS workshops in Bellinzona: the new challenges of the railway sector
The increase in demand, the capacity of railway hubs and the complexity of the system is putting the railway industry face to face with new challenges that SBB is tackling with a long-term strategy capable of ensuring more flexible, frequent and rapid connections.
From this perspective, it was necessary for SBB of Bellinzona to be able to carry out effective and long-lasting maintenance interventions.
In fact, trains are constantly exposed to atmospheric agents , temperature changes and humidity , which is why corrosion can cause serious structural damage. After the total dismantling of the carriage, restoration works are carried out, followed by shot blasting, repainting and drying interventions, before the final reassembly.
To guarantee the resistance of its components against corrosion and wear and to facilitate light and heavy maintenance of the rolling stock , the SBB Bellinzona painting plant also needed technological modernization.
“One of the most recent investments we have made was that relating to the new liquid painting and drying booth supplied by Eurotherm Spa in Volpiano (Turin), the Italian company provided us with a flexible system with a totally innovative lateral extraction system” – states Marco Siccardi, project manager of SBB.
The new painting booth by Eurotherm
The new Eurotherm cabins should have been installed first in the Olten factory , then in Yverdon – les -Bains and, finally, in the new factory under construction in Arbedo-Castione. However, the Bellinzona workshops had an urgent need for it and, having started the collaboration with Eurotherm in October 2023, the cabin had already been completed at the Bellinzona warehouse on 1 May 2024 .
The liquid painting and drying booth that we designed and installed at the industrial plant in Bellinzona is specifically designed for the railway sector and is able to accommodate both the components and the actual railway carriages.
The challenge that the client presented to us in this case was twofold:
- obtain a flexible solution with which to manage the painting of different types of rolling stock;
- avoid building interventions for its construction, as it is a cabin to be installed in an existing warehouse, to speed up times and reduce costs.
“This was also possible thanks to an innovative feature of the cabin designed by the Italian installer : the laterally designed suction system made it possible to avoid excavations for the construction of the floor system, which generally characterizes this type of cabin, speeding up thus the delivery times” continues Siccardi.
The innovative lateral suction system
Our technical team has customized the system, equipping it with a lateral suction system divided into 3 distinct sectors. The suction walls for a total length of 34 meters on both sides virtually separate the cabin into 3 sectors, each managed by an AHU – Air Treatment Unit, which guarantee recirculation in 3 zones with the possibility of managing each area in a independent.
Each of the 3 AHUs is equipped with an automatic water system to cool or heat the air based on external seasonal temperatures, so that the cabin maintains a constant temperature range throughout the year.
Each of the three units is also equipped with a system for controlling the humidity level through an osmosis water plant, which prepares the water to be atomized inside the unit, while the humidity sensors are placed directly in the plenum .
A curiosity about this air treatment plant is that, due to its enormous size, we had to resort to the intervention of a helicopter to move the chimneys to be placed outside the building, an essential procedure in a plant with systems out of measure like those of the Bellinzona workshops.
