Harmonic Elimination of 25 kV AC Electric Railways Utilizing a New Hybrid Filter Structure

Thyristor rectifiers are widely used in electric railways in order to control the speed. As a consequence of their usage in addition to substantial input lead current, an enormous amount of harmonics is injected into the grid. To avoid such harmonics as well as reactive power compensation, reactive power hybrid filters consisting of active and passive filters are utilized. Regarding different passive and active filters connection in a hybrid filter, various configurations of hybrid filters are possible. Each of these configurations has different functionality in harmonic elimination and reactive power compensation. Since electric railway has a non-linear and variable nature, a novel hybrid filter structure is designed that compensates reactive power and eliminates harmonics to attain desired harmonic level regarding the conventional allowable harmonics level standards. The designed filter model is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK and then applied to a harmonic model of an electric railway. Since electric railways are single phase loads, specific three-phase to two-phase transformers are required to feed the load. To attain such purpose, adaptive transformer is utilized in this paper. The proposed model has properly overcome the deficiencies of active and passive filters as well as demonstrating an appropriate performance in reduction of total harmonic distortion (THD).