Hitachi Social Innovation Business: The Catalyst to Powering India

India, with its regional, social, and cultural multiplicity poses a unique challenge to some of the world’s leading solution providers. Matching its unity in diversity, Hitachi’s Social Innovation Business, widely recognized for its transformative impact is powering good for almost nine decades by offering comprehensive OT x IT solutions delivered through a unified digital strand.

By constantly expanding the limits of the group’s Green Technologies (GX), Digital Technologies (DX) and Innovation capabilities, Hitachi Social Innovation Business has ushered a distinctive digitally empowered era in the key sectors of Education, Agriculture, Healthcare, Energy, Manufacturing, Payments, Construction and Mobility. While gearing the nation to emerge as a global industrial and economic hub, Hitachi is relentlessly leveraging its technological virtuosity to spur the Government of India’s vision of a sustainable carbon neutral future in the face of stratospherical spatial expansion and penetration of urbanization.

The trend is not only escalating society’s carbon footprint but also exerting enormous pressure on city’s social infrastructure like intracity travel. Therefore, one of the identified imperatives of the policy makers to build resilient urban areas is to resolve the growing travel and transport inadequacies in a sustainable way.

The Metro Leads the Way

An efficient and low polluting mass transportation system is a critical urban necessity. The Government realized the resonating impact of metro as mass rapid transit system in resolving the spiralling commuting challenges of the busiest cities around the world. With the formation of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the highly dense National Capital Territory (NCT) of India and the adjoining sprawling NCR regions are witnessing a paradigm shift in mass commuting within and across satellite towns.

Globally, the Delhi Metro is the first Railway project in the world to be recognized for carbon credits by the United Nations. The busiest metro system has been accredited with preventing over 90,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide³ from being discharged into the atmosphere by optimizing its power requirement. As a result, contributing to alleviating global warming in a big way.

Over a period of time Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) began observing persistent inadequacy in converter of train sets post the warranty period. Whenever trains on the Metro network apply brakes, it releases electrical energy as loss, but three-phase - traction motors installed on these trains act as generators to produce electrical energy which goes back into the Overhead Electricity (OHE) lines utilised by other trains running on the same line. This led to energy loss and increasing carbon footprint. Failure of Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBT), a key component of electric rail vehicles was identified as primary flaw that is used as switching device in converter/Inverter of motor drive in the train set. Hitachi India Pvt. Ltd. Infrastructure Division proposed IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) modules to BT for DMRC application. There are 8000 IGBT's installed in the metro trains. DMRC gradually decided to replace all the existing IGBT's in the train with Hitachi IGBT. After replacement with Hitachi IGBT, the converter failure and train downtime reduced drastically and hence reducing carbon emission further putting back DMRC on track against its fight against global warming.

Consequently, Hitachi is co-creating solutions to firmly put DMRC back on track to meet its vision of providing sustainable, safer, and efficient urban transportation to the society while continuously reducing its carbon footprint.

Hitachi is committed to partnering DMRC’s transformation by ensuring reliability of its original products throughout their lifecycle and establish consistent dialogue to impart knowledge about evolution in technologies and handling of power semiconductor products.

Bolstered by the outstanding performance of IGBTs in DMRC, Hitachi envisions to become the preferred localized partner in India’s upcoming green field metro projects across various parts of the country and enhance reliability, safety and power efficiency of the future of urban transport. Concurrently, enhancing Social, Environmental, and Economic values of the customer and improving Quality of Life significantly.

Hitachi Social Innovation Business is empowering millions of commuters travel seamlessly for an improved quality of life and contribute towards building a sustainable society. Hitachi India’s ensuing partnership with DMRC is a stellar example of the group’s commitment to powering good is touching millions of lives by coalescing its GX, DX and Innovation multiverse. Hitachi is fully geared to provide solutions towards achieving sustainable, environment-friendly, and affordable transportation systems.