Intelligent Application for Monitoring the Pantograph-Catenary Contact in Electric Railway Transportation

This paper presents an intelligent software application implemented in order to easily diagnose the contact line characteristics in electric railway transportation. This application acquires data from a data acquisition system mounted on the upper part of the inspection locomotive. The software application offer information about the vertical distance between the upper part of the inspection car and the pantograph contact with the contact wire, zigzag movement, temperature and humidity according to the GPS coordinates of the moving train. The intelligent software application will be used to make decisions about urgent interventions as well as to predict the future evolution of contact line parameters. The time variation of the vertical distance between the upper part of the inspection locomotive and the pantograph contact is used to determine the contact force exerted by the pantograph on the LC. This distance offer information about the contact force between the pantograph and line contact using a high pass numerical filter with 2 Hz cutoff frequency.