The Development of a New Traction Power System Simulator

A new suite of traction power system simulator tools has been developed to meet the engineering and design requirements of railroad and rail transit projects. The simulator has been designed to deal with both dc and ac systems and to track closely with the latest technological developments and trends in the industry. For the dc applications, features include emulation of wayside energy storage devices, reversible rectifier substations, stray current and automatic grounding switches. For ac applications the tool supports simple, autotransformer and booster transformer feeding systems. The simulator is designed to operate with other suites of software that are available in the transit rail industry. For example, train performance data can be fed into the traction power simulator from Train Performance Calculator (TPC) or network simulator packages. This paper discusses the approaches taken in handling some of the more complex issues that arise in load flow analysis, including reduction in solution processing time using efficient computation algorithms, component parallelization to exploit multiple processors and multiple computers, power demand adjustments for underpowered or non-receptive conditions, and flexible and comprehensive textual and graphical post processing.