This paper presents a methodology for testing railway pantograph/catenary systems based upon the dynamically substructured system (DSS) approach for combined physical and numerical components, originally developed by Stoten and Hyde. The main advantage of DSS is that it can provide more stable substructured testing than alternative schemes, such as the commonly used hybrid simulation method, often referred to as hardware-in-the-loop simulation. The developed method is validated through experiments using a simple pantograph rig, together with a numerical simulation of the catenary. In order to realise a real-time simulation of the large catenary model, for the first time in DSS testing this study uses (I) a modal analysis technique to reduce the dimension of the contact wire model and (II) a moving window approach to represent long-distance travel of the pantograph. Finally, the experimental DSS test results are compared with simulations of the benchmark pantograph/catenary emulated system.
For high-speed trains, active control of the pantograph is crucial technology to collect electrical current from the overhead contact wire. In this paper, a mathematical model of the pantograph-catenary system is developed to design a controller, and then a sliding mode controller is proposed to regulate the contact force in the presence of variation in the equivalent stiffness of the catenary system. Although the proposed controller is based on the standard sliding mode control theory for output regulation problems, a design parameter is introduced to guarantee the existence of sliding mode from a practical point of view. Furthermore, the physical interpretation of the dynamics during sliding mode is given by analysis.
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