Supporting Railway Electrification with Novel Pantograph-Catenary Dynamic Analysis Tools

The race for lower carbon emissions pressures railway transportation to meet demanding electrification goals. Infrastructure managers seek ways to electrify their network at an accelerated pace, challenging the industry for a faster, cheaper and less disruptive electrification. Conversely, rolling stock manufacturers carry the heft on providing an interoperable train-pantograph configuration able to perform through different parts of the network with different catenary designs. In this fast paced and complex environment, set to meet strict electrification goals, the industry seeks the employment of pantograph-catenary interaction dynamic analysis tools to validate and verify their design solutions at an accelerated pace, as well as provide a degree of assurance to the network. In this work, a novel pantograph-catenary modelling and dynamic analysis framework is proposed to respond to the industry demands, where these types of tools are able to be employed in an electrification project environment, helping to accelerate and ensure design and construction decisions. The use of such framework enables catenary systems to be automatically modelled following track geometry and the catenary design layouts provided as input. This includes the consideration of catenary systems with complex discrete features, set in in any arbitrary track geometry, such as curves and line junctions.