Robust Active Vibration Control for Rail Vehicle Pantograph

This paper deals with vibration control for a light rail vehicle's pantographs. The concepts of force cancellation, skyhook damper, and contact wire-following spring are jointly applied to constitute an effective controller for vibration suppression. Performance of the control system is evaluated on the basis of variations of displacement and acceleration between the pantograph and contact wire. An active control law is developed by means of a linear quadratic regulator design to derive a stabilizing control law for the pantograph system with the time-varying contact force between the pantograph shoe and catenary. A systematic optimization process with Pareto set and variable weights for the design of active suspension parameters of the pantograph using a constrained multiobjective evolutionary algorithm is developed. Extensive simulations are well performed to verify our proposed design.