Power Electronics Advancement in Electric Traction Drives-An Overview

This paper presents the power electronics advancement in electric traction drives. In this paper the power electronics traction transformer and multilevel converter are used to improve the performance of electric traction dives. In this paper power electronics devices are used with the traction drives so that the harmonics developed after inversion operation can be reduced using multilevel converter. The main advantage of multilevel converter kind of topology is that it can generate almost perfect current or voltage waveforms, because it is modulated by amplitude instead of pulse-width.In this paper introduction to power supply used in electric traction and medium frequency transformers using cycloconverters are used to reduce the frequency of the AC supply used in electric traction. Combining modern high-power semiconductor devices with constantly improving magnetic materials opens up the possibility to replace bulky low-frequency transformers with a new medium voltage medium frequency conversion structure. This paper also discussed the power quality improvement in electric traction drives using power electronics devices. In this paper there is a discussion of the replacement of conventional pantographs by using unconventional current collection from a contact line for electric traction vehicles.