Power electronics technologies for a lithium ion battery tram

Hybrid electric LRV can be defined as light rail electric vehicles fed by a contact feeder line (trolley, over head wire, third rail, and so on) as well as an on-board electrical energy storage device. We developed a tramcar with trolley-collection and on-board battery hybrid technology. This technology achieves 3 main features: 1) Energy consumption reduction 2) Trolley maintenance cost reduction 3) Short distance contact-wire-less electrical drive for the urban landscape improvement. This paper concerns the hybrid control algorithm for the trolley hybrid battery tram, and on the running test results with on-board rechargeable lithium ion battery (600 V system). The regenerated energy rate to the kinetic energy in time of braking (from 50 km/h) is over than 70%, even with the current collector folded and re-opened in powering and in regenerating. And fed only by the battery energy, the tramcar ran continuously over 17 km with stopping at every 250 m.