Standardization of driving cycles for shunting locomotives – reduction of energy consumption and optimized selection of new powertrain solutions

Abstract

Modern rail vehicles are facing a lot of different challenges in order to be successful established on the market. Besides the primary requirements safety, fulfillment of the scope of performance and low investment costs, there are increasing requirements such as energy consumption, local emissions (global warming gases, harmful substances and noise), non-operation periods and maintenance intervals. All these requirements are crucial in case of customer satisfaction. For train operating companies as well as for locomotive manufactures one challenge in the development process is the meaningful simulation of real service profiles. For mainline traffic as well as for existing rail vehicles some mathematical-physical models already exist. These models are based on track topology and timetables. They show results for energy consumption and driving times. In the field of shunting, the fact that the topology, the towing capacity and a concrete timetable cannot be determined exactly, leads to a problem for the simulation and the evaluation of new powertrain solutions for shunting locomotives. This shows the need of an approved method to create standardized driving cycles. In the future there will be still the need of shunting locomotives for the passenger traffic and of course for rail cargo. This is shown by the constant number of shunting locomotives during the last years. As a consequence the field of shunting has a clearly recognizable share of the whole railroad energy consumption. Therefore it is obvious that optimized powertrain systems for shunting locomotives will have a clear influence on the reduction of CO2-Emissions and other exhaust emissions. The generation of standardized driving cycles is a necessary step for an efficient and reliable analysis of vehicles and powertrain systems. With the basis of defined characteristics and determined values, it is possible to create synthetic driving cycles with the use of mathematic algorithms for shunting locomotives. With this method the big range of operation profiles for shunting locomotives can be transferred into universal driving cycles without changing characteristics. The following method of creating driving cycles is validated by measurements with a H3-Hybrid locomotive from Alstom. With the development of new alternative powertrain solutions for rail vehicles the requirements, especially for the interfaces and the interaction between vehicle components, will increase. Standardized driving cycles will be helpful to adjust vehicle components and operating strategies and can increase the reliability of railroad vehicles.