Investigation on Multilevel Inverter Applied for Railways Traction Systems: Economically Efficient

Indian Railway's Electric Multiple Units (EMUs) has been adopted as a solution to the challenges for environmental hitches caused by the steam and diesel engines. In general, an electrified system of railways is provided with 25kV, 50 Hz AC supply. It is fed to three phase, 400 V, 50Hz traction motor with the used of step down transformer, converter and inverter. The traction in railways needs higher operation of voltage. It is to be accomplished by the use of recent introduced multilevel inverter (MLI). This research paper presents an implementation of multilevel inverter in Railway EMUs. Transistor clamped H-bridge (TCHB) MLI with small amount of semiconductor components and sole voltage source is used for implementation in Railways. Therefore, quantity of semiconductor components, expenditure and dimensions are condensed. The MLI which is proposed here includes an H-bridge clinched with a switch of bidirectional nature. It is efficient to produce a multilevel output voltage. This research paper presents a new switching method which has a very easy logical and arithmetic operation. The new switching method is general for any amount of steps/ levels. The performance and functional study of the MLI which is proposed is confirmed with the use of simulation software of MATLAB/SIMULINK. Comparison has been done for both the power circuits.