Energy Saving with On-board Supercapacitors in MRT Purple Line, Bangkok

This paper presents an on-board energy storage for reducing energy distribution from the substations and reducing energy loss in the conductor transmission lines of the mass rapid transit system by using supercapacitors as energy storage devices. The power distribution and the train movement of the MRT purple line in Bangkok, Thailand, which has 16 passenger stations, 10 substations feeding by 750 V DC power supplies through its third rail, and a total round distance of 20.94 km, are simulated and calculated in MATLAB. The total energy consumption of the MRT purple line services is 75.432 MWh per day. For this study, installing the on-board supercapacitors can effectively reduce the energy distribution by 22.10% and energy loss in multi-conductors by 73.91%.