Development of narrow-band low-frequency active filters for DC railway vehicles

To avoid failures in the signalling systems of light-rail plants, low frequency components of the line current may often not exceed specified limits. These limits are in the range of 0.1% of the line current. Presently the low frequency components are damped with passive filters. This paper proposes an active filter to reduce the low frequency components of the line current. A method for dimensioning a digital control algorithm for active filters, which are implemented in the railway vehicle, is presented. Time domain simulations are carried out. They predicted a good behaviour of the active filter for all kinds of vehicles and different realistic conditions. The active filter was realized with an IGBT-inverter and the filter algorithm was implemented in a microcontroller, to ensure a high flexibility. The measurements presented in this paper prove the validity of the simulations