The novel railway system RailCab makes use of autonomous vehicles which are driven by an AC linear motor. Depending on the track-side motor part, long-stator or short-stator operations are possible. The paper deals with the operation of the doubly-fed induction motor which is used for motion control and for transferring the energy required onboard the vehicle. This type of linear motor synchronization of the traveling fields generated by the stationary primary and moving secondary windings is an important and demanding task because the instantaneous positions of the vehicle or the primary traveling wave must be determined with high accuracy. The paper shows how this task is solved at the moment and what improvements are under development.

Date Published: 30 October 2006
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 6358, Sixth International Symposium on Instrumentation and Control Technology: Sensors, Automatic Measurement, Control, and Computer Simulation, 63582C (30 October 2006);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6358:
Sixth International Symposium on Instrumentation and Control Technology: Sensors, Automatic Measurement, Control, and Computer Simulation
Jiancheng Fang; Zhongyu Wang, Editor(s)