Innovative active control strategies for pantograph catenary interaction

Abstract: The pantograph - catenary interaction is one of the most important features in high speed trains, and to guarantee a reliable current collection is the target that every railway system must take into consideration in order to speed up trains. The problem that goes against this direction is mainly the variation of the overhead equipment's stiness. To understand the phenomenon a lumped mass model of the pantograph with a rigid body attached to the ground representing the contact wire were built up; in this way a complete lumped mass model is developed. All information regarding both wire and pantograph set up is introduced as lumped parameters. Creating the model, dierent active control strategies as ideal control, PID control and optimal control are introduced. All simulations are made in GENSYS, while the control part is made inSIMULINK; a connection between those two softwares was created as part of the thesis using TCP/IP protocol. Results compared to experimental acquisition are satisfactory in terms of contact force representation. The standard deviation and average value's errors of the contact force are lower than 10%; regarding the control system, typically 20% of reduction of the standard deviation compared to the passive case is achieved. Also a comparison with a nite element program is done in order to better understand the limits of the model compared with a more sophisticated one. The comparison shows a good accordance up to 60 % of the average speed of the wave propagation in the catenary. The last feature analyzed is how the behavior of the controlled system changes introducing a real actuator: results shows that the performance is reduced in dierent ways considering dierent speeds, but no instabilities occur.