Detection and monitoring system of the pantograph-catenary in high-speed railway (6C)

In the traction supply system, most of the defects come from pantograph-catenary system. Due to the violent vibration of the catenary and the violent arc in the pantograph-catenary, the collapse and short circuit of the catenary perhaps take place and interfere or even threaten the safe operation of the vehicles. In the past decades, the detection of pantograph-catenary is performed manually. 40 thousand railway personnel climb onto the support devices to check the potential defects during night. With the rapid growth of the China high-speed railway's mileage, to ensure the safe operation of the high-speed railway and eliminate the hidden danger of the workers, an automatic detection system is established to report all of the potential defects and evaluate the health of the pantograph-catenary. To achieve the overall and real-time detection, the working period and installation positions of the 6C equipment are carefully designed. Meanwhile, a three-level hierarchy is built to transfer and process the big data from the local administrations to the China Railway Corp., which is a unified framework in the nation. China Railway Corp. also enacts eight requirements for the pantograph-catenary detection system. 6C system can measure the dynamic and static geometry parameters and the current collection, and detect the defective working states of the components and the operation condition of the pantograph-catenary. Considering the feedbacks from the 18 railway administrations, 6C system realizes a fine-grained detection and diagnosis of the pantograph-catenary and greatly improves the detection efficiency. In addition, a huge economic and social benefit has been earned.