고속선용 드롭퍼 피로분석 연구

A Study on Fatigue Analysis of Dropper for High Speed Electric Railway

The dropper supports the contact wire and is attached using thimbles and various types of dropper clips on the catenary. Consequently droppers are subject to mechanical loads from friction and buckling during the passage of pantographs. If such mechanical loads occur repeatedly with every passing pantograph, it is possible that the dropper wire will break due to fatigue. In order to investigate failure causes for the high speed line dropper, theoretical analyses and experiments have been carried out. In this paper, mathematical formulas are derived for the prediction of the dropper static load. The measured values in the experiment agree well with the theoretical predictions. And, we performed measurement for the variation of forces on the dropper. To analyze the cause analysis on fracture of dropper wire, we have conducted experiment such as fatigue test of new products, SEM(Scanning Electron Microscope) and EDX(Energy Dispersive X-ray) of fractured specimens in the field. Finally, we also measured the vertical displacements when a pantograph moved at 300km/h under the Korean high speed overhead line.