Author Description

This work addresses EMC issues related to the railway domain, as brought up by industrial experience in applying the European standard EN 50121. The need to test rolling stocks on non-standardized facilities is here shown to be a major source of misinterpretation, eventually leading to overestimating the electromagnetic emissions radiated by a train. In particular, the test procedure described in the standard is shown to yield site-dependent results, due to the weakness of some basic assumptions on the propagation of electric signals along railway supply-lines. To this end, propagation and radiation phenomena along such lines are investigated, under a quasi-TEM assumption, proposing approximate descriptions validated through measurements on actual sites. Direct simulations can thus be used for assessing the impact of the infrastructure. Furthermore, an experimental characterization procedure is proposed in case of lack of a site description, based on magnetic field measurements.