System Model for Initial Charging of a New Battery Set Using Grid and Solar Pv System for Railway Applications

This paper is focused on solving the existing practices for charging a new Lead-acid battery set before actually using it for signalling related operations and power circuits of diesel locomotives in Railways. The primary objective is to use renewable energy sources during the charging cycle and also utilize the energy waste during the discharging cycle. Instead of wasting that energy, we can transfer it to the grid to generate revenue from it or utilize it to meet the demand of DC load of a railway station. For the charge cycle, a PV panel is used during the day and a single-phase grid is used during the night to charge the battery set in this proposed Simulink model. For the discharge cycle, grid and DC loads are used to discharge the battery set. To replace the existing manual process, a state flow control logic is designed to work according to the standard process of initial charging a battery set. It is observed that the proposed method can save around 4910.902 MWh of energy compared to the existing practice taking place in Indian Railways.