UC Berkeley

In high-speed electric trains, a pantograph is mounted on the roof of the train to collect power through contact with an overhead catenary wire. The effect of fast harmonic and parametric excitation on a stochastically driven pantograph-catenary system is studied in this paper. A single-degree-of-freedom model of the pantograph-catenary system is adopted, wherein the stiffness of the nonlinear spring has a time-varying component characterized by both low and high frequencies. Using perturbation and harmonic averaging, a Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov equation governing the stationary response of the pantograph-catenary system is set up. Based on the transition probability density of the stationary response, it is found that even small high-frequency parametric excitation has an appreciable effect on the system response. Among other things, it shifts the resonant frequency and often changes the response characteristics markedly. Copyright © 2014 R. H. Huan et al.