Dead time effect in a railway traction system

The aim of this paper is to establish the description of how dead time, which is introduced in the PWM voltage inverter affects the performance of a railway traction system conceived by Alstom-Transport Inc. By means of a model of this high power system, the authors have imposed three different simulation operating conditions using the SABER solver of Analogy Inc. When simulating the system with dead time effect, two different rates of dead time to switching period are defined: 5% and 9%. There are interactions caused by the dead time and so, a stabilisation strategy has been implanted and simulated, in order to reduce the system's perturbations. This strategy has to respect some constraints, because it is not possible to change neither input filter structure nor any input filter component value. And it is not feasible either, to measure or to control the voltage input E and the inductance current i/sub L/.