HIGH-SPEED RAILWAY - COLLECTING PANTOGRAPHS ACTIVE CONTROL AND OVERHEAD LINES DIAGNOSTIC SOLUTIONS

The catenary-pantograph system and its dynamic behaviour play a decisi ve role for high speed trains from the power collecting point of view. The decisive criterion for assessing the contact quality is to reduce the contact force variability as far as possible. In this paper activ e pantograph elements are introduced in order to improve the system pe rformance. The control strategy is based on Extended Kalman Filter tec hnique, used to get a contact force estimation available for control f eedback. The same estimation procedure based on the Extended Kalman Fi lter is also used to obtain some information useful to overhead line d iagnostic purposes.