Contact Wire Irregularity Stochastics and Effect on High-Speed Railway Pantograph–Catenary Interactions

In high-speed rail operations, contact wire irregularity (CWI) in a catenary is a common disturbance to the pantograph-catenary interaction performance, which directly affects the quality of current collection. To describe the pointwise stochastics of CWI, the power spectral density (PSD) function for CWI is proposed, and its effect on the pantograph-catenary interaction is investigated. First, a preprocessing procedure is proposed to eliminate the redundant information in the measured irregularities based on the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD). Then, the upper envelope of the irregularity, which contains all the information regarding the dropper positions on the contact wire, is extracted. A form of the PSD function is suggested for contact wire irregularities. A methodology is proposed to include the effect of random irregularities in the assessment of the interaction performance of a pantograph-catenary. A developed target configuration under dead load (TCUD) method is used to calculate the initial configuration of the catenary, in which the dropper points on the contact wire are placed on their exact positions. Finally, the effect of the random contact wire irregularities on the contact force is investigated through 500 numerical simulations at each operating speed. The present results indicate that random irregularities have a direct impact on the pantograph-catenary contact, including an increment in the dispersion of the contact force statistics. The stochastic analysis shows that over 70% of the results with irregularities are worse than the ideal result without irregularities.