No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Due to the increasing importance of reliability and availability of electric traction drives in Railway applications, early detection of faults has become an important key for Railway traction drive manufacturers. Sensor faults are important sources of failures. Among the different fault diagnosis approaches, in this article an integral diagnosis strategy for sensors in traction drives is presented. Such strategy is composed of an observer-based approach for direct current (DC)-link voltage and catenary current sensors, a frequency analysis approach for motor current phase sensors and a hardware redundancy solution for speed sensors. None of them requires any hardware change requirement in the actual traction drive. All the fault detection and isolation approaches have been validated in a Hardware-in-the-loop platform comprising a Real Time Simulator and a commercial Traction Control Unit for a tram. In comparison to safety-critical systems in Aerospace applications, Railway applications do not need instantaneous detection, and the diagnosis is validated in a short time period for reliable decision. Combining the different approaches and existing hardware redundancy, an integral fault diagnosis solution is provided, to detect and isolate faults in all the sensors installed in the traction drive.

This paper deals with the development of analysis tools for axial-flux permanent-magnet machines. Normally, the study of this kind of machine involves three-dimensional (3-D) finite element method (FEM) (FEM-3-D) due to the 3-D nature of the magnetic problem. As it is widely known, the FEM-3-D software could take too much time, and both definition and solving processes of the problem may be very arduous. In this paper, a novel analysis procedure for axial-flux synchronous machines is proposed. This method consists in the combination of 2-D FEM simulations with analytical models based on the Fourier-series theory. The obtained results prove that the proposed method could be a very interesting option in terms of time and accuracy.Index Terms-Analytic models, axial-flux machines, finite element method (FEM), Fourier series.