No more the clutter of visible plumbing, loose wiring and dirty wet floor - the novel materials in right form, colour and finish completely change the railway toilets towards a functionally improved unit with tidy looks.
The project on ' Development of FRP Modular Toilet Unit for Railways', taken up under the Advanced Composites Mission programme, has been a collaborative effort by a multi-agency task force involving the Industrial Design Centre and Department of Aerospace Engineering of IIT-Bombay, RDSO-Lucknow, RCF- Kapurthala, ICF-Chennai, and Carriage Repair Workshop of Western Railway -Mumbai. The Industrial Design Centre (IDC) of IIT-Mumbai has been instrumental in conceptualizing, designing and fabricating full- scale mock-up of modular toilet units. The Department of Aerospace Engineering of IIT-Mumbai has extended support in terms of structural design of FRP toilet unit, fibre lay- up design, fabrication process, design of mould for fabrication, selection of suitable raw materials, testing and mechanical characterization of the prototype and has also helped provide quality assurance norms for fabrication. The toilet unit consists of four parts: the flooring trough, two L-Shaped side-walls and roof. All the four are fastened together with self-tightening screws at the mating faces and their assembling is done inside the coach. The salient features are :
The modular toilet unit with advanced features has evoked keen interest in the Railways for improved aesthetics, easy maintainability and longer life. On initial success of the prototypes, the Railways plan to induct a considerable number of FRP toilet units for largescale field trials across the country.
For further information, please Contact Sh. S. Biswas, Adviser & Head
Advanced Composites Programme Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council 4th Floor, 'A' Wing, Vishwakarma Bhavan, Shaheed Jeet Singh Marg New Delhi-110 016, India Ph: (91)-011-2686 3816 Fax: 26961158 E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. |