Transformerless Power Supply for AC Rail Vehicles

Abstract

This study develops a transformer-less power supply for AC railway vehicles. The rail on the permanent route of an AC electric railway is grounded. The proposed power supply circuit takes advantage of this feature and performs AC-DC power conversion without using a bridge circuit. The circuit topology is a combination of indirect type DC-DC converters. The operation and control of power conversion from AC to DC power run and from DC to AC regeneration is confirmed using numerical simulations. In addition, the operation of the proposed circuit is validated experimentally.