An Innovative Solution for Suburban Railroad Transportation: The Gas Turbine-Hybrid Train

Abstract

The paper reports the latest results of a study conducted on a hybrid train in which a gas turbine, operating in several alternative control modes (fixed point, on-off or load-following), generates the electrical energy for recharging a battery package and for driving the electric motors of a suburban train. The model, originally developed for automotive applications, has been validated by experimental tests performed on an ELLIOTT TA-45 GT group in the ENEA-Casaccia Research Center.

This paper describes the preliminary design of the traction system and the choice of the energy flow control strategy. Numerical simulations have been carried out, based on an actual train mission (the Norwegian railroad track between Asker and Lillehammer) and on industrial data for the single components. Following two different approaches, separate optimizations of the gas turbine set and battery package are performed, in which the objective function is the monetary cost per mission or, which is equivalent, the kWh/(t·km) for a given mission profile.

Keywords

• GT-driven hybrid propulsion, railroad transportation systems, transportation costs