Crosswind Effects on Current Collection Quality of Railway Pantograph–Catenary: A Case Study in Chengdu–Chongqing Passenger Special Line

Abstract

As a common disturbance to the railway pantograph–catenary system, the crosswind usually deteriorates the current collection quality and threats to operational safety. The main topic of this article is to evaluate the effect of crosswind on the interaction performance of pantograph–catenary considering the aerodynamic forces acting on both the pantograph and catenary. The pantograph–catenary system of the Chengdu–Chongqing passenger special line is adopted as the analysis object. The absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) is employed to model the catenary. The numerical accuracy is validated via the comparison with the field measurement data collected from an inspection vehicle operating at 378 km/h. According to the quasi-steady theory, the wind load acting on the catenary is derived. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is employed to calculate the lift and drag forces acting on each component of the pantograph, which are used to derive the equivalent aerodynamic force that can be applied in the lumped-mass model. A special spatial grid is defined for the pantograph–catenary system to generate the fluctuating wind field based on the empirical spectrum. The simulation results indicate that the pantograph–catenary system of Chengdu–Chongqing passenger special railway has an acceptable performance with a crosswind speed of 20 m/s. However, when the crosswind increases up to 30 m/s, some contact force statistics exceed the safety threshold with a turbulence intensity of more than 17%. Through the analysis of the operational safety, it is found that the contact wire always works within the safety range of the pantograph head with a crosswind speed of 30 m/s. However, some safety issues can be seen from the maximum uplift of the pantograph head with a turbulence intensity of more than 21%.