| Abstrakt: |
Decarbonisation of heavy haul rail is an essential contributor to a zero-emissions future. This paper provides an overview of the energy modelling being conducted at Aurizon, Australia's largest rail freight operator, to define the energy demands and onboard storage capacities and to define the requirements for battery and hydrogen fuel cell technology to replace current diesel-electric systems. The energy modelling uses event recorder data from existing diesel-electric locomotives for 150 round trips across Aurizon's operations. Detailed analysis of the haul between Moura and Gladstone shows that, on average, 6.6 MWh of energy is required per locomotive per round trip and that 1.7 MWh or 29% is currently lost through the dynamic braking system. Capturing and reusing the dynamic braking energy or "regenerative braking" (RB) in the Moura haul can reduce the net energy demands by 29%, leaving a net energy requirement of 4.9 MWh. Applying the analysis across a sample of 13 Aurizon operational corridors ranging in length from 100 to 2,800 km shows Aurizon has energy requirements of 2.5 to 68 MWh with a regenerative braking potential of 17 to 39% with an average of 29%, leaving a net energy requirement of 1.5 to 54 MWh per locomotive. Assuming the net energy requirements must be provided once per trip, this requires a large onboard storage capacity. In contrast, the regenerative braking storage component is much smaller because the energy is stored and used multiple times per trip. Hence even though the regenerative braking energy represents 29% of the total energy, the storage capacity is only a fraction of the total (0.4 to 2.0 MWh). This demonstrates the importance of RB batteries as a critical aspect of decarbonisation. Based on these significant onboard storage requirements, a future 2030+ Battery Electric Locomotive (with a usable capacity of 6.7 MWh (twice that which would be currently available) would be able to service hauls up to 400 km. Beyond this range-extenders in the form of battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell electric tenders would be required to plug into the back of the BEL to extend their range to efficiently meet the haulage requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
