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

Abstract

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 10% of the energy could be provided by the assistance of the train.

A review of vibration energy harvesting in rail transportation field

“…Ambient energy harvesting in the railway environment is the key technology to achieve the self-powering of monitoring systems ( González-Gil et al., 2013 ; Bosso et al., 2021 ). There are considerable wind resources around moving trains, hence wind energy harvesting is considered a promising approach in the railway field ( Sindhuja, 2014 ; Oñederra et al., 2020 ; Kumar et al., 2016 ; Nurmanova et al., 2018 ). Especially in tunnels, slipstream generated by passing trains has a huge potential to produce energy for powering monitoring sensors ( Pan et al., 2019a , 2019b , 2019c ; Guo et al., 2020 ; Laws et al., 2020 ).…”

Energy, exergy, economic, environmental (4E) and frequency distribution analysis of train wind gust with real-time data for energy harvesting

“…from the most recent study by M. Palanisamy et al a prototype model of VAWT achived 21.508 W at a gust speed of 5.9 m s −1 with a tip speed ratio(TSR) of 0.304 (Raja Sekhar et al 2021). Anthoer study with VAWT for train energy harness shows 32.3 MWh energy could be produced in a year (Oñederra et al 2020). Of course this theory is not only limited to trains but also applicable to fast moving vehicles on high ways (Shridhar et al 2016).…”