Wind Energy Harnessing in a Railway Infrastructure: Converter Topology and Control Proposal

• Main Authors: Oier Oñederra, Francisco Javier Asensio, Gaizka Saldaña, José Ignacio San Martín, Inmaculada Zamora
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-11-01
• Series: Electronics
• Subjects: wind; railway; MPPT; MVDC; DAB
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/11/1943

Long distances in the vicinities of railways are not exploited in terms of wind energy. This paper presents a scalable power electronics approach, aimed to harness the wind potential in a railway infrastructure. The key aspect of this proposal relies on both using the wind energy in the location, and the displaced air mass during the movement of a train along the railway, in order to produce electrical energy. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT) are used in order to take advantage of the wind power, and widely used and well-known power converter techniques to accomplish the goal, showing MPPT techniques, parallelization of converters and power delivery with a Solid State Transformer (SST). Results are shown according simulations of the whole system, with and without train activity, resulting that 30.6 MWh of the energy could be generated without the train, and the energy generated with the assistance of the train could reach 32.3 MWh a year. Concluding that almost the <inline-formula><math display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>10</mn><mo>%</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> of the energy could be provided by the assistance of the train.