• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.297-303
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• 2016

This paper introduces auxiliary power supply systems (APS) for railroad applications and proposes a new power conversion structure for highly-efficient and lightweight APS systems. The proposed structure focuses on an improvement of the power density in APS. It eliminates unnecessary power conversion stages in the conventional APS structure by modulating the dc/dc converter circuit and the structure of the system. The dc/dc converter circuit used in the proposed structure is based on a multi-level half-bridge converter, a widely used topology in railroad APS applications; a flying capacitor is newly added to the conventional circuit. The added capacitor is used not only to enhance the soft switching condition of the switches, but also so that the new pantograph will have a side voltage source of a battery charger in the APS structure. Since the battery charger uses the pantograph side voltage source in the proposed structure, rather than using the output of the main dc/dc converter in the conventional structure, the size and efficiency of the main dc/dc converter are reduced and increased, respectively. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed structure, simulation results will be presented with metropolitan transit APS specifications.