Power Electronics Technologies for Railway Vehicles

This paper describes the current range of advanced IGBT propulsion inverters used in railways from light rail vehicles to high speed trains & locomotives. The second part of the paper describes future trends in IGBT railway propulsion drives. One such trend is the concept of power integration which leads to weight, volume and cost reduction . Finally, for systems with an AC input supply, a concept for reducing the weight of the main input transformer is also described. This uses a configuration of resonant converter and a medium frequency transformer , the so called e-transformer, and could be particularly targeted for 15 kV, 16.7 Hz supplied systems.