HEINE Resistors, a company established in 1904, has now obtained International Railway Industry Standard (IRIS) certification.

The IRIS regulations are internationally accepted rules for the quality management systems to be applied by railway manufacturers and their equipment suppliers, developed by the Union des Industries Ferroviaires Européennes (UNIFE), headquartered in Brussels, in close cooperation with the leading railway system builders.

IRIS is based on the ISO 9001 standard and adds railway-specific requirements to that standard.

“This [certification] enables HEINE to respond more flexibly to, and accept, a wider range of orders from leading rolling stock makers around the world,” says managing director Dipl-Ing Detlef Vier. In 2009, for example, HEINE delivered 200 head-high braking resistors of 1.2MW for coal train locomotives that were part of a Siemens project executed in Queensland, Australia.

It goes without saying that the fleet of Dresden trams is also braked with resistors made by HEINE: “Rail vehicles must be equipped with resistors for braking when the excess energy cannot be fed back into the power network. The energy generated in the electric motor is fed into the resistor where it is converted into heat,” explains the company’s technical manager, Dipl-Ing (FH) Annette Röhrich.

Also in 2009, HEINE received, via its subsidiary in Shanghai, an order for the manufacture of 500 so-called instantaneous overvoltage limiting resistors (MUB) for the CRH3-380 high-speed train. Vier said: “On this train, the resistors are seated on the roof where they are among others subjected to extreme wind forces because the train, which connects Beijing and Shanghai, is planned to reach a speed of 380km/hr. In order to meet the tough requirements, we built a model of the roof structure and tested it in the wind tunnel.”

For the 80 employees in Dresden and Shanghai, the new IRIS certificate is an investment in the future and an important criterion for receiving more contracts in the worldwide railway market.

Free white paper

HEINE Resistors has also recently uploaded a free white paper to railway-technology.com. Please download the free white paper here.