This paper describes a new EU co-funded project on metrology for smart energy management is electric railway systems (MyRailS). The project involves 7 national metrology institutes, 3 universities and 6 railway companies. Research focusses on the following topics: i) new calibration facilities for energy meters on-board installed, ii) power quality monitoring systems, iii) accurate estimation of the saved energy by the installation of new reversible substations (RSS) and iv) by the adoption of eco-driving strategies.

Electric arcing due to contact interruption between the pantograph and the overhead contact line in electrified railway networks is an important and unwanted phenomenon. Arcing events are short-term power quality disturbances that produce significant electromagnetic disturbances both conducted and radiated as well as increased degradation on contact wire and contact strip of the pantograph. Early-stage detection can prevent further deterioration of the current collection quality, reduce excessive wear in the pantograph-catenary system, and mitigate failure of the pantograph contact strip. This paper presents a novel arc detection method for DC railway networks. The method quantifies the rate-of-change of the instantaneous phase of the oscillating pantograph current signal during an arc occurrence through the Hilbert transform. Application of the method to practical pantograph current data measurements, demonstrates that phase derivative is a useful parameter for detecting and localizing significant power quality disturbances due to electric arcs during both coasting and regenerative braking phases of a running locomotive. The detected number of arcs may be used to calculate the distribution of the arcs per kilometre as an alternative estimation of the current collection quality index and consequently used to assess the pantograph-catenary system performance. The detected arc number may also contribute to lowering predictive maintenance costs of pantograph-catenary inspections works as these can be performed only at determined sections of the line extracted by using arcing time locations and speed profiles of the locomotive.

Railway electrical networks rated at 25 kV 50 Hz are characterised by significant levels of voltage and current harmonics. These frequency components are also time varying in nature due to the movement of trains and changing operational modes. Processing techniques used to evaluate harmonic results, although standardised, are not explicitly designed for railway applications, and the smoothing effect that the standard aggregation algorithms have on the measured results is significant. This paper analyses the application accuracy of standardised power quality (PQ) measurement algorithms, when used to measure and evaluate harmonics in railway electrical networks. A shorter aggregation time interval is proposed for railway power quality measurement instruments, which offers more accurate estimated results and improved tracking of time varying phenomena. Harmonic active power present in railway electrical networks is also evaluated in order to quantify the impact it has on the energy accumulated by electrical energy meters installed on-board trains. Analysis performed on 12 train journeys shows significant levels of non-fundamental active power developed for short periods of time. As an energy meter will inadvertently absorb the financial cost of non-fundamental energy produced by other trains or other external power flows, results are provided to support recommendations for future standards to measure only fundamental frequency energy within train energy measurement meters.

In recent years, test sets for both conventional and analog nonconventional instrument transformers have been made commercially available. Reference transformers are still of the conventional type. Therefore, test sets need to compare an analog signal of a conventional level with another analog signal of a different order of magnitude or, in the case of current-to-voltage transformers, even a different quantity. Traditional designs based on bridge techniques are not suitable for this application. This paper describes a new calibrator that reaches uncertainties of the order of 10x10⁻⁶ while being suitable for the calibration of test sets for nonconventional analog instrument transformers and fully computer-controlled.

In this paper, the efficiency of a 2.75 MW nacelle drivetrain on a test bench was determined traceably at various load points. For this purpose, so-called transfer standards for mechanical and electrical power measurement were additionally installed and integrated into the nacelle drivetrain. As torque measurement contributes greatly to the overall uncertainty, the static torque calibration was expanded to include additional influences present under rotation. An overall system efficiency of 89% was measured in the high torque and high speed range. The relative expanded measurement uncertainty for efficiency determination was between 0.30% and 0.72% over the entire operating range. Both the efficiency and the relative expanded measurement uncertainty were calculated for each operating point.

This paper describes a high accuracy laboratory PMU calibrator that is presently being developed at METAS. This reference grade calibrator enables traceable measurements of the dynamic performances of PMUs as outlined in the upcoming version of the standard IEEE C37.118 as well as the testing of the impact of power quality disturbances on PMU measurements. The calibrator is being developed in conjunction with a software simulator permitting the simulation of PMU algorithms in order to facilitate the direct comparison between simulation and measurement results. The tests waveforms generated by the simulator can be converted into electrical signals suitable to PMUs. The usage of IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol permits the synchronization of the test waveforms to UTC.