Feasibility Study of Hydrogen Fuel Cell and Battery Freight Locomotive using EMR and Simulink

Currently, initiatives are made to implement zerocarbon technologies and replace trains that use fossil fuels. Transportation is one of the significant sources of carbon emissions. This work investigates the applicability of fuel cell and battery technology to freight railway lines on the pit-to-port manganese line between Hotazel and Port of Ngqura in South Africa. Energetic macroscopic representation (EMR) and MATLAB/Simulink are used to control, represent and simulate interactions and power transfer of the system. The sizing of onboard sources (fuel cells and batteries) is done such that, the retrofit space constraint is respected. The results show the required traction energy peak of 89 MWh and reduced to 65 MWh due to regenerated energy. Battery charged to 74% at the end of the one-way trip. However, due to constraints on battery capacity, a substantial amount of the regenerated energy is wasted as heat. Furthermore, it was found that the size constraint sources are feasible to deliver the required payload.