A new novel power electronic circuit to reduce stray current and rail potential in DC railway

The problem of stray current in DC railways has not been solved completely in spite of many years of research and investigation, specially where there is not good rail insulation to prevent corrosion risk to the infrastructure. A new novel circuit, based on power electronic semiconductors, which has the same advantage of a booster transformer in AC systems, is proposed in this paper for DC railways. This circuit forces the return current to flow through return current wire (RCW) instead of the rail or earth. As a result, the current of the contact wire (CW) and return current wire would be approximately the same. Then, not only has the stray current reduced but also the rail current and potential decreases as well.