An analysis method for correlation between catenary irregularities and pantograph-catenary contact force

QIN Yong(秦勇)^{1, 2}, ZHANG Yuan(张媛)^{1, 2}, CHENG Xiao-qing(程晓卿) ², JIA Li-min(贾利民)², XING Zong-yi(邢宗义)³

(1. State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety (Beijing Jiaotong University), Beijing 100044, China;
2. School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Beijing 102600, China
3. School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China)

Abstract:Pantograph-catenary contact force provides the main basis for evaluation of current quality collection; however, the pantograph-catenary contact force is largely affected by the catenary irregularities. To analyze the correlated relationship between catenary irregularities and pantograph-catenary contact force, a method based on nonlinear auto-regressive with exogenous input (NARX) neural networks was developed. First, to collect the test data of catenary irregularities and contact force, the pantograph/catenary dynamics model was established and dynamic simulation was conducted using MATLAB/Simulink. Second, catenary irregularities were used as the input to NARX neural network and the contact force was determined as output of the NARX neural network, in which the neural network was trained by an improved training mechanism based on the regularization algorithm. The simulation results show that the testing error and correlation coefficient are 0.1100 and 0.8029, respectively, and the prediction accuracy is satisfactory. And the comparisons with other algorithms indicate the validity and superiority of the proposed approach.

Key words:catenary irregularities; pantograph-catenary contact force; NARX neural networks; correlation analysis