Driving Equipment with Three-Phase Inverters and Asynchronous Traction Motors for Trolleys and Trams

This paper on the use of driving equipment for trolleys and trams with three-phase inverters and asynchronous tractions motors is from the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer System Design and Operation in Railways and Other Transit Systems, held in Beijing, China, in 2010. The authors’ company, ICPE SAERP S.A., is the main producer of electric drives for urban traction and for railway vehicles in Romania. The authors stress that improvement of passenger comfort and the downsizing of costs is a must for public transportation companies, particularly for trolleybuses and trams. Both of these goals can be achieved by using modern electric drives (DC choppers or three-phase inverters), which can reduce power consumption and increase control of the vehicle. The main products for electric traction are: drives for traction motors of the vehicles (DC choppers for DC series motors and three-phase inverters for asynchronous and for synchronous motors) and converters for auxiliary services of the vehicles with two development directions, battery chargers (DC converters) for drive supply (24Vdc or 110Vdc) and three-phase inverters for auxiliary asynchronous motors (steering, compressor). The authors describe trolley and tram driving equipment with three-phase inverters for asynchronous motors that ICPE SAERP has delivered in the past three years. The paper also presents the equipment’s performances and analysis of the principles for electrical power diagrams.