Multibody Modeling of Pantographs for Catenary-Pantograph Interaction

In the great majority of railway networks the electrical power is provided to the locomotives by the pantograph-catenary system. From the mechanical point of view, the single most important feature of this system consists in the quality of the contact between the contact wire(s) of the catenary and the contact strips of the pantograph. Therefore not only the correct modeling of the catenary and of the pantograph must be achieved but also a suitable contact model to describe the interaction between the two systems must be devised. The work proposed here aims at enhancing the understanding of the dynamic behavior of the pantograph and of the interaction phenomena in the pantograph-catenary system. The potential contribution of this work to the railway community includes the decrease of the number of incidents related to this system and the reduction of the maintenance and interoperability development costs. The catenary system is described by a detailed finite element model of the complete subsystem while the pantograph system is described by a detailed multibody model. The dynamics of each one of these models requires the use of different time integration algorithms. In particular the dynamics of the finite element model of the catenary uses a Newmark type of integration algorithm while the multibody model uses a Gear integration algorithm, which is variable order and variable time step. Therefore, an extra difficulty that arises in study of the complete catenary-pantograph interaction concerns the need for the co-simulation of finite element and multibody models. As the gluing element between the two models is the contact model, it is through the representation of the contact and of the integration schemes applied for the finite and multibody models that the co-simulation is carried on. The work presented here proposes an integrated methodology to represent the contact between the finite element and multibody models based on a continuous contact force model that takes into account the co-simulation requirements of the integration algorithms used for each subsystem model. The discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed methodologies and of its accuracy and suitability is supported by the application to the real operation scenario considered and the comparison of the obtained results with experimental testing data. In the process future developments that include representing the pantograph model with flexible bodies, non-linear force elements and the inclusion of wear and cross-wind effects are also discussed.