An Improved Torque and Current Pulsation Suppression Method for Railway Traction Drives Under Fluctuating DC-Link Voltage

For railway traction drives, the active front end usually adopts a single-phase rectifier. However, the dc-link voltage of this single-phase rectifier contains a second-order fluctuating component due to the fluctuation of the instantaneous power at both the ac and dc sides. Fed by the fluctuating dc-link voltage, the traction motor suffers from severe torque and current pulsation. The hardware solution with an additional LC resonant filter is simple, but it will reduce the power density of the system. An alternative solution is to eliminate the beat component in the stator voltage/current through modulation ratio or frequency compensation. However, it is difficult to achieve high performance for the conventional feedforward method. In this paper, an improved closed-loop torque and current pulsation suppression method is proposed, which can eliminate the q-axis current pulsation component in the field-oriented control system through frequency compensation. The torque pulsation suppression is also achieved automatically. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the torque and current pulsation in various operation modes compared with the conventional feedforward method.