FUNDRES kick-off meeting held on 28 November 2019 at SNCF RESEAU premises in Saint-Denis, France

The kick-off meeting for the Shift2Rail JU funded project, FUNDRES, was held at SNCF RESEAU premises on 28 November 2019 in Saint-Denis.

FUNDRES (FUture UNified DC Railway Electrification System) is a €0,75 million project led by LAPLACE (Laboratory of plasma and conversion of energy, University of Toulouse, France) in collaboration with three other European partners from Italy, Switzerland and France, namely: the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano – POLIMI), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – EPFL) and the International Union of Railways (UIC).

The main objectives of this 24-month project starting in December 2019 are to:

• Quantify potential impact of the increase in voltage levels in DC railway electrification;
• Explore suitable power supply schemes and impact of power electronics and energy storage technologies, as well as interactions with three-phase utility grids in ancillary service markets;
• Deliver modelling tools to simulate all relevant scenarios and to implement Digital Twins, both at equipment level and system level;
• Set up representative experimental demonstration to evaluate performances of the future DC system, focusing on 9kVdc as an example;
• Give recommendations for the new future unified DC railway power supply to the project’s advisory group, to the members of Shift2rail’s Innovation Programme n°3, to standardisation committees

The meeting started with an overview of the FUNDRES project given by its coordinator (Philippe Ladoux from LAPLACE) and by Sebastien Denis, Shift2Rail JU programme manager, who presented the Shift2Rail JU programme and how FUNDRES fits into this context.

Garry Bosworth from Network Rail then presented the status of the Shift2Rail project IN2STEMPO (Innovative Solutions in Future Stations, Energy Metering and Power Supply), FUNDRES complementary project. Discussions began on how partners of both projects could efficiently collaborate to deliver outstanding results in due time.
Technical partners of the consortium (Prof. Francesco Castelli Deza from POLIMI and Prof. Drazen Dujic from EPFL) then presented their work plan for the next two years.

This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail JU under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement 881772.