Hardware-in-the-Loop Test Bench for Simulation of Catenary–Pantograph Interaction (CPI) with Linear Camera Measurement

Abstract

Catenary–pantograph contact force is generally used for assessment of the current collection quality. A good current collection quality not only increases catenary lifetime but also keeps a stable electric supply and helps to avoid accidents. Low contact forces lead to electric arcs that degrade the catenary, and high contact forces generate excessive wear on the sliding surfaces. Railway track operators require track tests to ensure that catenary–pantograph force remains between safe values. However, a direct measure of the contact force requires an instrumented pantograph which is generally costly and complicated. This paper presents a test bench that allows testing virtual catenaries over real pantographs. Therefore, the contact point force behavior can be tested before the track test to guarantee that the test is passed. Moreover, due to its flexibility, the system can be used for model identification and validation, catenary testing, or contact loss simulation. The test bench also explores using computer vision as an additional sensor for each application. Results show that the system has high precision and flexibility in the available tests.

Assessment of catenary condition monitoring by means of pantograph head acceleration and Artificial Neural Networks

“…To get closer to a real scenario, the proposed method was tested with acceleration samples measured on a DSA-380 pantograph. The collector-head was excited by a linear motor on the pantograph test bench described in [28]. As shown in Fig.…”

“…The ANNs were then applied to practical problems of increasing difficulty, such as identifying the presence of slackened or broken droppers, detecting severe contact wire wear and predicting the contact force maximum, minimum and standard deviation. Finally, the proposed method was tested in an experimental environment, in which an ANN was trained and tested with acceleration measures of the DSA-380 pantograph on the test bench described in [28]. The proposed method combines the simplicity and low-cost measurements of pantograph collector acceleration and the multi-purpose framework of artificial intelligence techniques in assessing fault detection and current collection quality.…”

Modelling and Analysis of Expansion Joints’ Effect on Dynamic Performance of Railway Rigid Overhead System

“…The interaction between the pantograph and contact wire is achieved using the penalty function method [ 19 ] or the Lagrange multiplier method [ 20 ]. To accurately replicate pantograph-contact wire behaviour, hardware-in-the-loop tests have been conducted, utilizing a realistic pantograph and a mimic overhead system [ 21 , 22 ]. Moreover, in order to reflect complex working conditions, numerical simulations of pantograph–contact wire interaction considering overhead system defects [ 23 ], contact wire irregularities [ 24 , 25 ], wave disturbances [ 13 , 26 ], vehicle–track perturbations [ 27 , 28 ], and wind load [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ] have been carried out to evaluate their effects on contact quality.…”