Page 20 - Innovation in energy management: contribution of railways to sustainable mobility

technical features are used, that can be more affected when connecting with the railway.
It must be considered that, in any case, different conventional RFIG corridors will migrate
to alternating current systems in the future, being able to take advantage of existing
external networks (distribution in these cases). This approach should be seen as a
sustainable energy management measure.

The use of FACTS in alternating current electrical substations could be a necessary
requirement, migrating to new traction equipment that would allow control of
imbalances on the external network as well as the voltage value on the Transmission Line.
This considers the use of an external electrical network with low short-circuit power. In
the same way, it is expected that energy consumption can be reduced, as demonstrated
in the European R&D project In2Rail.

R.6. Promote predictive maintenance of the railway electrical
network assets

Investment: Nature: Improvement:

Related to:
R.7

The maintenance normally applied to the railway infrastructure is periodic and
preventive. The purpose of this maintenance is to anticipate failure by repairing or
replacing the elements of an installation, respecting service lifetime, which will be
defined by the manufacturer's criteria. For this, continuous monitoring of the elements
of the installation is carried out based on the documentation provided by the
manufacturer. In this way, the parts are replaced without waiting for their end of life or
breakdown, and maintenance is carried out during hours that do not affect the operation
of the railway line.

Alternately, best performance can be achieved with predictive or condition-based
maintenance. This is based on the use of tools that acquire information on the
deterioration of the elements and provide a knowledge base that enables assessment of
risk of failure and development of strategies to decide when to carry out the intervention
or delay it, if applicable. It is a monitored process in which the objective is to have the
maximum amount of data that helps the railway manager to determine the moment at
which a fault will occur and thus determine the opportune moment to act.

The application of this type of maintenance to the electrical assets of the infrastructure
may result in an improvement in operations, making them more sustainable.

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Position paper: Innovation in energy management: contribution of railways to sustainable mobility
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