Modeling the Railway Contact Line System for Fault Location Purposes

Quick identification of the damaged area is required to shorten the time of delays in train movement and reduce the damage from the electric rolling stock downtime in case of persistent short circuits in a contact line system. The operation of existing fault location indicators, including some microprocessor relay protection and automatic control devices of a contact line system, is based on the implementation of remote methods for determining fault location (DFL) using emergency mode parameters. The implementation of these methods involves the use of homogeneous models representing the traction network in a simplified form, which causes a large error of the fault location calculation and low efficiency of existing DFL methods. The influence of various factors on the error in determining the distance to the fault location can be eliminated by using detailed heterogeneous models of the traction network. The article explores known approaches to modeling an AC traction network and proposes a detailed model of a single-track section, as well as an algorithm for automated construction of an equivalent circuit and calculating the emergency mode parameters. The simulation results are updated dependences of the short circuit loop parameters on the distance to the fault location. Supposedly, the results obtained will be used to improve the accuracy of promising DFL methods.