A rotary frequency converter model for electromechanical transient studies of 16 2/3 Hz railway systems

Railway power systems operating at a nominal frequency below the frequency of the public grid (50 or 60 Hz) are special in many senses. One is that they exist in a just few countries around the world. However, for these countries such low frequency railways are a critical part of their infrastructure. The number of published dynamic models as well as stability studies regarding low frequency railways is small, compared to corresponding publications regarding 50 Hz/60 Hz public grids. Since there are two main type of low frequency railways; synchronous and asynchronous, it makes the number of available useful publications even smaller. One important reason for this is the small share of such grids on a global scale, resulting in less research and development man hours spent on low frequency grids. This work presents an open model of a (synchronous-synchronous) rotary frequency converter for electromechanical stability studies in the phasor domain, based on established synchronous machine models. The proposed model is designed such that it can be used with the available data for a rotary frequency converter. The behaviour of the model is shown through numerical electromechanical transient stability simulations of two example cases, where a fault is cleared, and the subsequent oscillations are shown. The first example is a single-fed catenary section and the second is doubly-fed catenary section.