Dimensioning of DC traction substations with realistic traffic scenarios

Abstract

The study of energy consumption is fundamental for railway systems in general and for DC electrified railway systems in particular. It plays an important role in order to design a proper dimensioning of traction Substations (SSs). DC electrical multi-train simulators allow studying a lot of electrical variables that are related to energy consumption and, therefore, to electrical dimensioning. To upgrade the resemblance of these simulators closer to the reality, and consequently improve the reliability of the results, it is necessary to debug, improve and increase the variables introduced in the simulator. One of the main inputs to the electrical simulator is the traffic data. This research studies two new variables which improve the information of the traffic data and analyzes their possible influence on energy consumption and, consequently, on the SSs dimensioning. These variables are: a) dwell time in the stations, b) time shift in terminal stations. In order to reduce simulation time, the simulation has been divided into two stages. At the first stage a large number of simplified simulations with a lot combinations between dwell time and time shift was performed. At the second stage, the most representative scenarios obtained with the simplified simulations were simulated in the complete electrical simulator. Results showed that the simulations obtained with the addition of these new variables make it possible to obtain accurate consumption values. This allows a better dimensioning of the SSs, without incurring into the cost associated to over dimensioning the infrastructure in order to avoid operation failures.