• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.502-502
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• 2007

A catenary system should be designed to have an uniform elasticity over a span in order to maintain the lowest possible loss of contact between a pantograph and a contact wire. A elasticity uniformity of a catenary can be regarded as a important design factor used for predicting the current collection performance for a catenary. There are a couple of formulas to calculate the degree of elasticity uniformity of a catenary according to the literature survey. The effectiveness of these formulas is reviewed by performing catenary elasticity and loss of contact analysis for various different configurations of catenary systems using a beam element based FEM program. The results reveals that these formulas are not suitable to predict the current collection performance for a catenary. Therefore, a new formula based on the standard deviation of the elasticity over a span is proposed in this study. The analysis results show that the new formula for an elasticity uniformity of a catenary is very effective in predicting the current collection performance for a catenary.