Technical Review of Traction Drive Systems for Light Railways

Nursaid Polater and Pietro Tricoli
Additional contact information
Nursaid Polater: Department of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Pietro Tricoli: Department of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 9, 1-26

Abstract: Due to environmental concerns, governments around the world are taking measures to decarbonise railway transport by replacing diesel traction systems with cleaner alternatives. While the electrification of railway systems is spreading rapidly, it is unlikely that all routes will be electrified as the volume of passengers will not justify the high infrastructure costs. Therefore, it is expected that, for several lines, a combination of hydrogen and electric traction will be used, with the latter partly provided by fixed infrastructure and partly by batteries. Railway traction drives will then need to change to accommodate these new types of power supply. A detailed review of the available traction motors and drives is provided with this review, given application to the new hybrid-electric systems. In particular, permanent magnet synchronous motors with multiphase windings are evaluated in comparison with traditional three-phase machines. Additionally, low and medium-voltage multisource power converters have been reviewed, taking into account the introduction of wide band-gap semiconductor devices.

Keywords: traction drive systems; traction motors; power converter; fuel cell propulsion; wide band-gap devices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/9/3187/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/9/3187/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:9:p:3187-:d:803236

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().