CSR Corporation Limited, one of
Ma Yunshuang, deputy general manager and technology director of CSR Qingdao Sifang Co Ltd, which developed the CRH380A train, said that the company has hired US lawyers to assess its intellectual property rights for the train and compare them to existing patents in the
However, whether the patents will be granted is not under the company's control, he added.
If
Ma said the train's technologies are rooted in Japanese technologies, but the CRH380A train is no longer the train imported from
Previous media reports said
CSR Qingdao Sifang Co Ltd partnered with Kawasaki Heavy Industries and produced the 200 km/h trains named CRH2 in
In the following year,
There have long been voices, including Zhou Yimin, the railway ministry's former deputy chief engineer and science and technology department director, doubting the reliability of the CRH380A model.
Zhou was quoted by the 21st Century Business Herald as saying on Tuesday that "the foreign companies wrote clearly in the contracts that the top speed for operation should be 300 km/h, not 350 km/h".
He said although the manufacturing capabilities of the rail industry have improved a lot with the introduction of overseas prototypes in recent years,
A railways ministry spokesman dismissed the comments on Wednesday, saying Zhou retired in 1998, too early to know the current situation.
Ma agreed that the trains imported in 2004 are not suitable to run at 350 km/h or 300 km/h.
"But the current trains are not the imported ones," he said.
The CRH380A train, for instance, has made innovations on at least three key parts - bogie, train head and train hull.
A bogie, similar to an automotive chassis, is a key part of high-speed trains. Every bullet train carriage has two bogies at the bottom. Its function is to make a running train reliable and able to carry a certain load with less shaking.
"If you compare a train to a running man, bogies function to make sure the runner doesn't fall, doesn't suffer muscle strains and doesn't feel dizzy," he said.
Changes to the bogie prototype are necessary because
For example,
These differences have an impact on train operations, and
In addition, CSR later started to develop 300 km/h trains and 380 km/h trains, but the bogie technology
Ma's team made adjustments to the bogie prototype to make trains able to run smoothly at 380 km/h, based on data gained from months of experiments on the high-speed railways.
"If you compare the bogie prototype imported from
"Our technologies may originate from foreign countries, but it doesn't mean that what we have now all belongs to them. We have added our knowledge gained from experiments to the train and made designs to satisfy our needs, so the new train is not theirs anymore."
In addition to bogies, the company also redesigned the train head so that air resistance of a CRH380A train is 5 percent less than for a CRH2.
Meanwhile, after more than one year of work accompanied by failures,
Ma said these efforts embody the strategy of initial assimilation followed by innovation.
"A simple technology import is using the technology as it is, but we did much more than that," he said.
"After the technology transfer was made, we did analysis and experiments on every part, trying to understand its design concept and the form of the technology used and figure out what we should do to make it work as we want."
According to Ma's estimation, more than 100 million yuan (US$15 million) has been poured into experiments and innovations of new high-speed train models, an amount 10 times what the company spent on the development of a train model in the past.
He Huawu, chief engineer with the Ministry of Railways, told China Daily that
Ma admitted that some parts of the new train, such as bearings, are made by
But all the parts bought from foreign countries are tailor-made according to CSR's technical requirements, which makes a difference, he said.
In CSR's development of 300-350 km/h trains and later 380 km/h trains, the Japanese side cooperated with CSR as a supplier, he said.