Identification of the catenary structure wavelength using pantograph head acceleration measurements

Abstract

For the condition monitoring of railway catenaries, the potential utilization of pantograph head (pan-head) vertical acceleration instead of pantograph-catenary contact force is discussed in this paper. In order to establish a baseline of the pan-head acceleration before it can be used for health condition monitoring, one of the essential frequency components, namely the catenary structure wavelength (CSW) is studied. Based on insitu measurements and feature analysis of the pan-head acceleration signal, an adaptive signal filtering approach is proposed to realize the identification of the CSWs. Preliminary results suggest that the CSWs contained in the pan-head acceleration can be reliably identified by the proposed filtering approach.Accepted Author ManuscriptRailway Engineerin