Everyone has heard of the story “The Little Engine That Could.” Most would remember the small engine that took on the task of pulling a long train over a high mountain when larger engines refused to do the job. The little engine’s willingness to try and overcome the task while chanting those memorable words “I think I can, I think I can” propelled it to accomplish what some thought was the impossible.

At The University of Texas-Pan American, the story of optimism and hard work could very well describe the faculty and students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who like the little engine took on a task that no big name university wanted to tackle.

Their challenge? To find an answer to a problem that has troubled the railroad industry for several decades. Known as bearing temperature trending, this phenomenon sees some bearings overheating when compared to others on the same train, resulting in train delays, stoppages or derailments. The problem was taken on by Dr. Constantine Tarawneh, associate professor and graduate program director for the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and a crew of four mechanical engineering faculty (Dr. Javier Kypuros, Dr. Arturo Fuentes, Dr. Stephen Crown and Dr. Robert Jones) and more than a dozen students.

Serving as the engineer of this research locomotive, Tarawneh, a heat transfer expert, set out with his team on a four-year mission to discover the root cause of the problem and also gain a better understanding of the heat transfer paths within tapered roller bearings. The project was funded and supported by BRENCO, a company under Amsted Industries Incorporated and a leader in railroad bearing manufacturing.

“My involvement with the project started by conducting detailed laboratory experiments to characterize the heat transfer paths within a railroad bearing, which were crucial in trying to determine what could cause the abrupt heating that has some bearings heating up to much higher temperatures when compared to other bearings on the same train,” Tarawneh said.

Amsted Rail Director of Research and Development Dr. Brent Wilson, a former colleague of Tarawneh at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), approached the UTPA professor with the issue in the summer of 2005. Wilson said he needed a thermal and heat transfer expert and looked for assistance to Tarawneh, who serves as a visiting professor and teaches heat transfer, thermodynamics and dynamics every summer at UNL.

“The problem we found was when they would pull bearings out and break them apart nothing was wrong with them. So we started to do an investigation and found that at the lower surface there was a problem that we could not explain. That is when we had to get involvement from the heat transfer side,” Wilson said.
Wilson said finding help in the area of heat transfer was difficult and was pleased when Tarawneh and UTPA decided to take on the challenge.

Wilson, who at the time was a UNL faculty member and had contracted with the company, said Tarawneh’s heat transfer-related research, led UTPA to securing its first contract for $15,000 from the company.

“Let’s put it this way, the original contract value started at $15,000, and this year I am ready to sign a contract for almost $434,000. That gives you an idea of how our confidence has increased,” Wilson said.

“I have been very impressed with the zealousness and diligence with which the faculty and students here can pursue these problems. It is refreshing to see that,” he added.

Today, the funding has grown to more than $849,000 that supports a bearing research lab, six graduate students, six undergraduate students and five faculty. In addition, UTPA has become the leading research institution for BRENCO/Amsted Rail.

“A master research agreement is now in place between UTPA and Amsted Industries Incorporated which will ensure a long-term relationship between the two institutions,” Tarawneh said.

According to Wilson, UTPA is currently the only university in the country actively working with a company to solve this obstacle.

“Not only are they the leaders, but probably the only ones actively pursuing this at the university-level,” Wilson said. “Amsted Rail is very aggressive about funding research outside to find the right experts who can identify the sources of this problem, and the team here is probably one of the few in the country that has even looked at this problem from this perspective.” Continued...