Development of steady arm damper for electrified railway overhead contact line with double pantographs based on numerical and experimental analysis

Abstract

To improve the carrying capacity, double pantographs are normally used to collect the electric current from the catenary. The mechanical wave excited by the leading pantograph affects the contact of the trailing pantograph and the contact wire, which usually deteriorates the current collection quality. To address this issue, a steady arm damper is developed in this work to reduce the wave intensity caused by the leading pantograph. The catenary is modelled by Absolute Nodal Coordinate Formulation. The numerical simulations indicate that the steady arm damper with certain values reduces the contact force variation of the trailing pantograph. But overlarge damping may behave as a hard spot and aggravates the interaction performance. The acceptable steady arm damping should be lower than 300 Ns/m. The optimal value of the steady arm damping coefficient varies with the train speed. The realistic damping ratio should be determined based on the operating speed of a railway line. Based on the simulation results, several realistic steady arm dampers are developed, which are placed between the cantilever and the end of the steady arm. An experimental test is conducted to investigate the effect of the steady arm damper on the reduction of vibration caused by the dropping sinker. The experimental results demonstrate that the steady arm damper can reduce the mechanical wave amplitude and eliminate its effect on the trailing pantograph.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Characteristic analysis of pantograph–catenary detachment arc based on double‐pantograph–catenary dynamics in electrified railways

“…The dynamic analyses of the DPC system show that the wave propagation produced by the leading pantograph will affect the PC interaction of the trailing pantograph [5,6], as shown in Figure 1. Much research has been carried out to improve the current collection of DPC systems, which is influenced by the interaction of two pantographs, such as proposing stability control strategies [7,8], providing improvement measures for the DPC system [9] and developing steady arm damper [10]. Based on the above research, under the coupling of waves produced by the two pantographs, it is obvious that the detachment state of PC in the DPC system is more complex than that in a single pantograph system.…”

Compatibility Study of Pantographs with Head Length 1600mm and 1950mm

“…In the railway network in Europe, a large number of pantographs of different lengths of pantograph heads are in use, and in the same country, depending on the type of line (conventional or high-speed network), or on the same line, several types of pantographs can be used [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]: 1600mm -France, Great Britain, Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Serbia;…”

Crosswind Effects on Interaction Performance of High-speed Railway Pantograph-catenary System: A Case Study in Chengdu-Chongqing Passenger Special Railway

“…The catenary is normally modelled by the finite element method or finite difference method [10], which can effectively describe the wave propagation [11], the geometrical nonlinearity [12] and the dropper slackness [13]. The pantograph is normally modelled by a lumped-mass model which can reflect the first two or three critical modes [14,15]. Some multibody dynamics models of pantograph are also developed to reproduce a realistic geometry [16][17][18].…”