The power quality concern in railway electrification studies

The increasing attention to power quality problems in railway electrification studies is leading to technical solutions, for solving the power supply problems, which are based mainly on the effectiveness of system configurations and schemes, without adopting special equipment in traction substations for disturbance mitigation purposes (e.g. transformer's Scott connection, filters, balancers, boosters, static compensators, etc.). These solutions are characterized by the following design criteria: high reliability and availability to reduce the probability of the traction system operation with a substation outage; adequate redundancy of the main system components both in power supply network and in traction substations; and high short circuit levels.