EcoTrain - The Erzgebirgsbahn’s new hybrid railway vehicle

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21th century. To counteract increasing temperatures and to decrease the dependency on fossil fuels various projects are currently conducted aiming at the private and all the different industrial sectors. One of them is the EcoTrain project which is an undertaking of a consortium of several project partners lead by Deutsche Bahn. Working closely with DB RegioNetz Verkehrs GmbH, the Erzgebirgsbahn, the TU Dresden, the Fraunhofer IVI as well as the TU Chemnitz, these partners explore and work on new approaches to finding solutions for an energy-efficient mass transit vehicle. The EcoTrain project aims at developing a hybrid railcar for the Erzgebirgsbahn: A standard class 642 rail vehicle is going to be converted to a cutting-edge and innovative hybrid railcar. Later on, this prototype will serve as basis for converting the entire Erzgebirgsbahn railcar fleet. This paper deals with the development of a drive train concept for the EcoTrain. Three different approaches to hybridization are explained in conjunction with their respective advantages and disadvantages. The hybridization concepts are assessed and the drive train concept of the EcoTrain is introduced. Furthermore the simulation tool IVIsion which was used to dimension the drive train components is explained along with the achieved simulation results. The paper concludes with an introduction to the so-called energy management module which is developed by Fraunhofer IVI. This module predicts the vehicle’s movement along the track and calculates recommendations for energy flow and driving style based on the schedule and current position