Impact of the Infrastructure on the

Electromagnetic Emissions Radiated by a Railway System

S. A. Pignari and D. Bellan

Polytechnic of Milan, Milan, Italy

Abstract
In this work, a circuit model based on multiconductor transmission line (MTL) theory is
developed for the EMC characterization of a 2x25kV AT railway system. The tool is validated
versus full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation, and is intended for analysis of the properties
of noise-currents distribution along the line conductors (i.e., the wires and the rails), to which the
radiation properties of the infrastructure are directly related. The MTL model proves to be
accurate and computationally efficient with respect to three-dimensional EM modeling. It is valid
for frequencies up to a few megahertz, and results to be useful for the investigation of the
impact of the infrastructure on the EM emissions radiated by a railway system.

Introduction
The demand for railway systems with higher and higher performances, as well as the need for
rolling stock interoperable over the Countries of the European Union (where different supply
systems are in use) have implied the increasing introduction of high powered electronic
equipment, micro-controllers, and electronic devices for the design of railway vehicles and, in
general, for railway system apparatus. Due to this trend, Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC)
within the railway environment has become a potentially critical issue. Consequently, the need
to continuously update railway systems performance and to adapt the quality of the services
offered to more and more demanding markets may clash against basic requirements related to
functional and safety aspects.
Since critical aspects related to EMC issues regard both the design and the implementation of
modern rail transportation systems, mandatory requirements have been recently developed that
should be fulfilled by every system operating in the rail environment. Namely, experimental
procedures and setups to be used for EMC assessment are detailed in the European Standard
EN 50121 [3]. However, even if Part 2 and Part 3-1 of such a Standard provide precise and
unambiguous description of the general aspects of the measurement procedure and a clear
definition of the limit values imposed to the electromagnetic (EM) emissions, nevertheless
measurements carried out according to Standard EN 50121 do not allow for a detailed
characterization of EMC properties of a railway system. This is mainly due to the fact that
measurements foreseen by EN 50121 do not permit to separate the contribution to the radiated
EM field due to the rolling stock from the contribution depending on the infrastructure in
proximity of which emissions are measured.
In general, the EMC level of a railway system to the outside world is determined by the
combined effect of the EM emission sources of the rolling stock and the infrastructure. On the
other side, the EM interaction between different parts of a railway system determines the
internal EMC level of that system. As regards emissions of the whole system toward the outside
world, in addition to emissions directly radiated from on-board power electronic systems
(primary radiation phenomenon), another phenomenon which plays an important role is
conduction of noise currents (generated by the power electronic systems as well), which are
placed onto the power supply line (i.e., the overhead wire) and radiated by the infrastructure
(secondary radiation phenomenon). Indeed, further contributions to EM emissions that should
be considered are, for example, those related to the noise-current distribution along the supply
line and due to: a) the non-ideal behavior of substations connected to the end-points of the
portion of the infrastructure where the rail vehicle under test is operated; b) the conducted
emissions due to other rail vehicles operated in proximity of the site where radiated emissions
are measured. Also these contributions are to be ascribed to the infrastructure rather than to the
rail vehicle under test.
 z
feeder
aerial ground

contact line

I1 I2
rail #1 rail #2 V1 Φ V2
ground conductor x

Figure 2. Chain parameter matrix

Figure 1. Cross-section of the MTL used to representation of a uniform section of the
model the railway system. MTL model.

On the other side, it should be noticed that the infrastructure behaves essentially as a very large
horizontally-shaped antenna, whose radiation properties strongly depend on a number of
parameters, such as the length of the segment used for test execution, the termination loads,
discontinuities along the conductors, geometrical asymmetries, etc. As a consequence, the
radiation phenomenon associated with the functional behavior of the on-board power systems is
substantially influenced by the architecture and the electrical configuration of the infrastructure
over which rolling stock is operated.
All the considerations discussed above are the motivations for this work, which represents an
attempt to model and interpret the dominant phenomena involved in the generation of the
emissions radiated by a railway system. In particular, the main scope of this theoretical analysis
is to understand the impact of the electrical and geometrical features of the infrastructure on the
radiated emissions. In line with this objective, a circuit model based on multiconductor
transmission lines (MTL) theory is developed and validated versus full-wave EM simulation of a
suitable stretch of a 2x25kV AT railway system. Unlike the modeling procedure introduced in [2],
which is limited to the analysis of functional aspects (50 Hz), the MTL model proposed here is
aimed at analyzing the main properties of the distribution of the noise currents along the line
conductors. That is, the conducted disturbances along the railway line wires and the rails (for
frequencies extending up to a few megahertz) to which the radiation properties of the
infrastructure are directly related. Development of a simplified distributed-parameter model is of
paramount importance in order to overcome the huge computational cost required by direct
three-dimensional EM modeling of a stretch of a railway line (extending for several kilometers),
in a wide frequency range. This is a crucial point also because large uncertainties related to
several parameters of a railway system may require estimations based on repeated-run
analyses.
Throughout the paper EM modeling is applied to a simplified version of a High-Speed 2x25kV
AT railway system in order to assess the validity and accuracy of the distributed-parameter
(MTL) model which, subsequently, will be used to characterize more complex and electrically
large portions of the railway system under analysis. Since MTL theory has an inherent
frequency limitation, the modeling tool developed in this paper is limited to frequencies below 1-
5 MHz, that is to the frequency range in which radiation is dominated by the magnetic field.

Model description
In this section, the distributed-parameter modeling procedure is detailed. The procedure is
applied to a High-Speed 2x25kV AT railway system and will be validated by comparison with
the outcomes of EM simulations performed by means of the commercial hybrid EM solver FEKO
[5], which combines the use of the Method of Moments (MoM) with the Finite Element Method
(FEM). Since EM simulation of complex and electrically large structures requires huge amounts
of memory and long computational time (resulting in a somewhat inefficient methodology of
investigation) the whole modeling procedure is applied to a simplified version of the system
under test. This is also consistent with the main objective of the present work which is not
prediction, but rather investigation of general properties of the structure, with special attention to
the sensitivity to geometrical/electrical parameters. Basically, the railway system will be treated
as a cascaded connection of uniform MTL sections, with lumped loads at the terminations and
at specific points along the railway line (e.g., autotransformers). In the following subsections, all
the system parts included in the model are described in detail.

Cross-section and per-unit-length parameters

A simplified single-track railway system is considered. Fig. 1 illustrates the cross-section
geometry. The following three main simplifications have been introduced with regard to the
railway line conductors: 1) only the contact-line wire was considered (i.e., the overhead wire
was neglected). In practical implementations, in fact, the overhead wire is periodically
connected (every a few meters) to the contact line, 2) the ground wire was not buried in the
terrain under the rails but it was placed just a few centimeters above ground, 3) the rails were
approximated by circular cross-section conductors with the same cross-section area as the
actual rails. Additionally, the presence of the ballast was neglected, due to its low conductivity
under normal conditions. As a matter of fact, it was assumed that in order to make general
considerations on the infrastructure behavior (with respect to the propagation and radiation of
noise currents) these assumptions do not significantly influence the results. Further work is
currently in progress in order to assess the above assumptions with respect to the dominant
phenomena under analysis. For each uniform section of the whole MTL structure, the per-unit-
length (p.u.l.) parameters are evaluated by resorting to the model proposed in [4], which takes
into account the presence of a non-ideal ground. This allows for the description of each uniform
MTL section in terms of a chain parameter matrix Φ , as

⎡V2 ⎤ ⎡ Φ11 Φ12 ⎤ ⎡V1 ⎤ ⎡V1 ⎤

⎢ I ⎥ = ⎢Φ Φ ⎥ ⎢ I ⎥ = Φ⎢ I ⎥ (1)
⎣ 2 ⎦ ⎣ 21 22 ⎦ ⎣ 1 ⎦ ⎣ 1⎦

where Φ11, Φ12, Φ21, and Φ22 are sub-matrices of the chain parameter matrix of the line section
and V1, V2, I1, I2 are vectors of voltages and currents at the section ends, as sketched in Fig. 2.

Impedance bonds
Earth conductors (i.e., aerial and ground conductors) are periodically connected to the rails
through inductive connections [known as impedance bonds (IB)]. Moreover, also the center-taps
of the autotransformers are connected to the rails through IBs. The EMC behavior of such
impedances was recently obtained in [6] by proper measurements in the frequency range (1
kHz – 10 MHz). In fact, from the circuit modeling standpoint, an IB can be viewed as a two-port
element, and characterized in terms of a frequency-dependent impedance matrix.
1000
|Zib11|
|Zib22| F
IF
magnitude [Ω]

100
cFC cFR
V
ESSLF C FR I
C
10 cCR VCR
R
1 3
10 10
4
10
5
10
6
10
7
ESS
frequency [Hz]

Figure 4. Circuit representation of an ESS:

Figure 3. Magnitude of the self-impedances of
low-frequency equivalent circuit (ESSLF)
an IB, treated as a two-port network .
augmented with parasitic capacitances.
 IF1 F IF2 IF1 F IF2

AT
C C

R1 R1

VF1 IB VF2 VF1 IB VF2

R2 R2
A A

G G

Figure 5. Circuit representation of the Figure 6. Connection between masts and the
connection between an AT and the rails earth conductors. (In gray: possible
through an IB. connection to the rails through IB.)

As a specific example, Fig. 3 illustrates the frequency behavior of the self-impedances (i.e.,
Z ib11 and Z ib 22 ) of an IB employed in the Italian high-speed lines.

Electrical substations
According to [1], a low-frequency circuit representation of an electrical substation (ESS) with
autotransformer can be obtained in terms of the admittance matrix Y . With respect to the
analysis proposed in this paper, it can be noticed that—by assuming the rails as the reference
terminal—the ESS can be represented as a two-port network. Moreover, in order to extend the
frequency range of the equivalent circuit, three capacitances were placed between the terminals
(see Fig. 4). These capacitances are used to allow for the modeling of high-frequency parasitic
effects. It follows that the two-port Y representation of an ESS with autotransformer can be cast
as

⎡ I F ⎤ ⎡Y11 Y12 ⎤ ⎡VFR ⎤ ⎡ y11 + jω (cFR + cFC ) y12 − jωcFC ⎤ ⎡VFR ⎤

⎢ I ⎥ = ⎢Y ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ =⎢
y21 − jωcFC y22 + jω (cCR + cFC )⎥⎦ ⎢⎣VCR ⎥⎦
(2)
⎣ C ⎦ ⎣ 21 Y22 ⎦ ⎣VCR ⎦ ⎣

where the y-parameters are obtained from the Y matrix in [1] by deleting the row and the
column related to the rails terminal.

Autotransformers
The low-frequency circuit representation of an autotransformer (AT) placed at one of the ends of
a railway line is derived in [1] in terms of the admittance matrix parameters. Also in this case, by
assuming the rails as the reference terminal, the two-port generalized Y -representation of an
autotransformer can be written as in (2).
On the other side, when the AT is placed along the line section under analysis (see Fig. 5), the
voltage/current relationship of such a multiport element can be cast in the following hybrid form:

A at1V1 + B at1I1 + A at 2 V2 + B at 2I 2 = 0 (3)

Masts
Earth conductors (i.e., aerial and ground conductors) are periodically short-circuited along the
railway line through metallic masts used to support the contact line (see Fig. 6). Additionally, a
further connection to rails is periodically implemented through an IB (gray connection in Fig. 6).
 F IL1 IR1 F

ESS AT
C C

R1 R1

IB VL1 VR1 IB
R2 R2
A A
G G

Figure 7. Circuit representation of the left-end Figure 8. Circuit representation of the right-
termination of the railway line. end termination of the railway line.

Also in this case, the voltage/current relationship of such connections takes the same functional
form of (3).

Terminations
The left and the right termination of the line are structured as in Figs. 7-8. In order to obtain the
voltage/current representation of such terminal networks it is therefore necessary to combine
results reported in the previous subsections. Accordingly, the following hybrid representations
are obtained:

A L VL + B L I L = 0 (4)
A R VR + B R I R = 0 (5)

In (3)-(5), A and B (with proper subscripts) are coefficient matrices that can be readily derived
from the circuit models reported in the related figures, not reported here for brevity.

Train
For the modeling of conducted emissions due to the onboard power systems, the train is
modeled as an ideal noise current source connected between the contact line and the rails.
Accordingly, its circuit representation takes the same form as (3).

Analytical solution
The analytical solution of the overall MTL model described in the previous section requires to
solve a linear system of equations consisting of the collection of the voltage/current
relationships defined above. This allows for the evaluation of the voltages/currents at each
interconnection between the components defined in the previous section. On the other side, in
order to evaluate the current distributions along the wires, chain parameter matrices of MTL
sections with variable length were exploited. In particular, by assuming as known quantities the
voltages/currents at the k-th interconnection, the current distribution between k-th and (k+1)-th
interconnections as a function of the longitudinal variable y is given by

I ( y ) = Φ 21 ( y − y k )Vk + Φ 22 ( y − y k )I k (6)

Numerical validation
Numerical validation of the analytical procedure described above was performed by simulating
the simplified railway system previously defined by means of FEKO [5]. In the simulation,
several specific choices and further simplifications were considered since the values of most of
the system parameters are difficult to be estimated (unless in specific cases), and typically
result to be totally or partially unknown.
With regard to the ESS (included in the left termination of the line), a simplified representation
can be obtained by neglecting the primary impedances, and assuming equal inductive
impedances at the secondary. Accordingly, the following admittance parameters can be easily
obtained: y11 = y22 = 1 /( jωLss ) and y12 = y21 = 0 . The value of Lss was estimated from
measurements reported in [1] as: Lss ≅ 10 mH . Moreover, for the parasitic capacitances
accounting for the EMC behavior, the following values have been assumed:
c FR = cCR = 100 nF, c FC = 10 nF .
For the ATs in the middle and at the right-end of the railway line it was assumed that
y11 = y12 = y 21 = y 22 = 1 /( jω 4 Lat ) . The value of Lat was estimated from measurements reported
in [1] for a specific AT as: Lat ≅ 3 mH . The values of the parasitic capacitances are the same
used for modeling the electrical substation.
Masts were placed every 60 meters along the railway line, and a lossy ground was considered
with conductivity σ g = 10 mS/m and relative permittivity ε rg = 10 . Proper conductivity values
were also assigned to the cross-section conductors.
Figs. 9a-9d show an example of the currents distribution related to a line section of length 1200
meters with the AT placed at midpoint. (The choice of the line length is not representative of a
real environment, but is aimed at allowing efficient model validation in terms of the simulation
time and the memory requirements of the EM solver.) The train is supposed to be located 400
meters away from the left end of the line. The plots show the ratio between the amplitude of the
current along the railway conductors and the current injected in the contact line by the train, at
200 kHz. The results obtained by the simplified MTL model are in good agreement with the
outcome of the EM simulation. As expected, the MTL model requires a much lower
computational time with respect to the EM solver, and this confirms the potential of the
proposed MTL model for the application to more realistic configurations (e.g., the case of long
railway lines) where EM simulation would be unfeasible (especially if parametric/sensitivity
analyses are required).
Finally, Figs. 10a-10b illustrate two specific examples of the magnetic field (normalized with
respect to the train current) radiated at the distance of 10 meters from the line and 3 meters
above ground. The field is evaluated along the railway line at two different frequencies. The
simulations are intended to show the influence of the masts on the field. In these figures, the
solid and dashed lines refer to a line model with and without masts, respectively. It is worth
noting that, contrary to what happens at the higher frequency (i.e., f = 1 MHz, Fig. 10b), at the
lower frequency (i.e., f = 1 kHz, Fig. 10a), the mitigation effect played by the masts (and related
ground loops) is clearly observed.

Conclusion
This article has shown that characterization of the main properties of noise currents distribution
along the conductors of a railway line is feasible in a frequency range extending up to a few
megahertz, by resorting to MTL modeling. Particularly. the computational efficiency of MTL
modeling combined with the possibility to obtain approximate radiated field estimates from the
current distributions allows for effective investigation of the impact of the various subsystems
(and their parameters). Accordingly, the tool developed in this work can be used to get an
insight into the role played by the infrastructure on the radiated emissions of the whole railway
system to the outside world.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of University (MIUR) under a Program for the
Development of Research of National Interest (PRIN grant # 2006095890).
 1.8 1
analytical analytical
1.6 numerical numerical

1.4 0.8
ground wire
1.2 contact line
current ratio

current ratio
0.6
1

0.8
0.4
0.6

0.4 0.2
feeder
0.2
aerial ground
0 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
position [m] position [m]

(a) (b)
1.5 1.5
analytical analytical
numerical numerical

1 1
current ratio

current ratio
0.5 0.5

0 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
position [m] position [m]

(c) (d)
Figures 9 a, b, c, d. Current distributions at f = 200 kHz along the six conductors of the MTL
model of the railway line. Comparison with EM simulation (FEKO).
-3
x 10
3.5 0.012
w/o masts
masts
masts
3 0.01 w/o masts
magnetic field / current [m ]

magnetic field / current [m-1]

-1

2.5
0.008
2
0.006
1.5
0.004
1

0.5 0.002

0 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
position [m] position [m]

(a) (b)
Figures 10 a, b. Magnetic field radiated by the railway line under analysis (EM simulation, by
means of FEKO) at different frequencies [(a) f = 1 kHz, (b) f = 1 MHz]. The solid lines refer to
the complete model (including masts), whereas the dashed lines refer to a simplified model
without connections between aerial and ground conductors (through the masts).

References
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(1989).
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Delivery, vol. 21, pp. 1721-1726, (2006).
[3] CENELEC, EN 50121, Railway applications - Electromagnetic compatibility, (2006).
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a lossy ground for a wide-frequency range – Part II: Multiconductor configuration”, IEEE
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