A Sliding Electrical Contact Solution Method Based on Reverse Rail Motion

This article is based on the local modeling method of rail reverse motion to solve the sliding electrical contact problem. The penalty function application method of the rail entry end face (nonequipotential surface) and the rail–armature interface under the technical system is derived. Only local modeling is performed near the contact domain, which greatly reduces the amount of computation. Through the numerical difference technique, it is allowed to move the number of noninteger meshes at each time step. The method does not require mesh reconstruction, and the element stiffness matrix only needs to be calculated once, which greatly improves the calculation efficiency. The finite element code is developed based on the MATLAB platform. The copper rail case is close to the calculation results of international numerical codes or experimental data, which verifies the correctness of the method. In addition, the electrical and thermal properties of the composite structure are evaluated and analyzed.