Influence of Pantograph Components on the Contact Quality of the Overhead System for High Speed Trains

In the great majority of railway networks the electrical energy is provided to the motorized units of the trainset by the pantograph-catenary system. The study of this system is of great interest to the railway industry as it contributes to decrease the number of incidents related to these components and to reduce the maintenance and interoperability development costs. In this work, a validated computational tool is used to study the pantograph-catenary interaction in order to assess on how the contact quality is sensitive to the pantograph components. For this purpose, several pantograph parameters are varied and the contact force results are compared against the ones obtained with the nominal case. These studies are performed for high speed trains running at different velocities.