Railway operators have been making efforts to improve energy consumption in the operation of Shinkansen and narrow-gauge trains. Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) used as traction motors are expected to reduce energy consumption from that of induction motors (IMs) which are commonly used in the recent train propulsion systems, since the loss in the rotor of PMSM is less than that of IM. Even a small degree of efficiency improvement will result in substantial amount of energy saving, since a large amount of energy is consumed in train operation. In this paper, we compare the energy consumption of PMSMs with that of IMs by numerical simulation to verify the effect of energy consumption of PMSMs.

Copyright (c) 2004 Railway Technical Research Institute