The ONCF (National Office of Morocco’s Railways) is the national enterprise of Moroccan railways and has trusted imatia with the implementation of two SADEP units (Autonomic System of the Detection of the State of Pantographs) at several points on the railway lines between the cities of Casablanca and Kenitra.
SADEP is a system that allows for a more efficient realization of the maintenance of a fundamental instrument for the functioning of the rail vehicles: the pantograph. This machine part is responsible for connecting the vehicle with the electricity from the high voltage line or catenary. Until now, the maintenance of the pantographs has been realized periodically by substituting the parts that had some kind of damage due to wearing or other causes. Sometimes, revisions were not done in time due to wrong forecasts of maintenance periods causing damage on the catenary infrastructure, which then had to be repaired at a relatively high cost.
The innovative system implemented by imatia, consists of sensors attached to a gantry line which then take a photo of the automatic wipers everytime a train pases under the gantry. The photo is instantaneously analyzed by a software program and send to the center of traffic control together with a complete integrity report, which includes a lot of information such as the speed of the train, the inclinations of the wiper, deformations of the plate, etc. This way, they can automatically detect any damage on the pantograph, without putting the infrastructure to risk.
This project is a milestone in the history of imatia, as it is our first project on the African continent and we are confident that it will not be our last.
