Rail Pad Fully Automatic Casting Line Zero-to-One Breakthrough

The customer is a world-leading provider of railway fastening system solutions, with core products covering high-speed railways, metro systems and heavy-haul railways, annual production capacity of 5 million sets, and dual authoritative certifications from CRCC and TÜV NORD. While holding absolute dominance in the steel fastening system market, the client faced a complete “knowledge gap” in the cross-border transformation to microcellular polyurethane rail pad products—lacking experience in polyurethane chemical systems, reaction kinetics and precision casting processes. Haifeng Polyurethane Machinery served as the “Chief Technology Architect,” delivering an end-to-end turnkey solution from formula verification to mass production, helping the client achieve a crucial zero-to-one breakthrough in the polyurethane field.

This project delivered a fully automatic polyurethane rail pad casting production line. The core equipment is a customized high-precision metering system, integrating high-precision gear metering pumps with Coriolis mass flow meters to achieve dual-loop closed-loop control and real-time flow correction, ensuring zero deviation in mixing accuracy. Key process parameters are automatically recorded every 5 seconds, creating an exclusive “digital file” for each rail pad to achieve full-process quality traceability.

The casting unit adopts CNC trajectory control technology, achieving millimeter-level precise casting positioning for complex mold structures and ensuring product molding quality. A dual-tank linkage system with working tanks and refilling tanks supports automatic refueling and continuous uninterrupted production, paired with a high-precision temperature and pressure control module to ensure a stable and controllable production environment. The production line integrates automatic mold opening, closing and robotic part picking functions, significantly reducing labor dependence and intensity.

Abandoning the traditional tunnel oven design, Haifeng innovatively adopted a tunnel-free water-heated mold frame solution. This design achieves uniform heat distribution and minimizes temperature deviations between molds, optimizing the polyurethane curing reaction process, thereby endowing products with more excellent physical and mechanical properties while featuring energy-saving and environmental protection advantages. From the initial formula verification in the R&D laboratory to 24/7 uninterrupted automated mass production on-site, what we delivered was not just a set of production equipment, but a mature manufacturing system that is replicable, high-capacity, high-quality and fully operational.