E-mail

TIFAC extends its arm in providing excellent public utilities. This is just a begining of creating awareness and to promote technology development & its percolation to locations across the country

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.

toilet.jpg (14961 bytes)
Project bagged the Certificate of Merit under the prestigious National Award for Excellence in Consultancy Services – 2001 given by the Consultancy Development Centre of the DSIR, GoI. Prof. K. Munshi of the Industrial Design Centre/IIT-Bombay received the certificate of merit in the inaugural programme of the National Consultancy Congress in New Delhi on January 15, 2002.

 

The Advanced Composites Mission has been a national initiative towards development of composite products and applications. The Mission has developed a basket of novel composite products for railway applications viz. Fibre Reinforced Plastic (FRP) gear-case for locomotives, jute-coir boards as berth backing material, FRP main door for coaches, FRP sleepers for girder bridges and radiator cooling FRP fan for diesel locomotives...

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 :

  • Pultruded FRP frame on all four sides of the door.
  • Proper ventilation in the toilet on the window side-wall and the lower part of the door.
  • Improved anti-skid PVC sheet with anti- abrasion properties for the flooring.
  • Concealed plumbing
  • FRP door for toilet with sandwich construction.

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.
 

Four FRP modular toilet units have been fitted into an AC-II tier coach of Mumbai-Delhi Rajdhani Express. The coach with FRP toilets was inaugurated by Dr. R. Chidambaram, Chairman-TIFAC, on October 20, 2001, at Carriage Repair Workshop, Lower Parel of Western Railways, Mumbai, in the presence of a galaxy of senior officials from Indian Railways.









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.