29. Estimation method for wear mode of current collection materials with the consideration of sliding history

Current collection materials, such as contact wires and contact strips, reach the end of their service life primarily due to wear, requiring significant labor for management and replacement. Although the mechanism of the wear mode that determines the wear progress of current collection materials has been clarified by experiments under certain conditions (Figure 1), it is necessary to consider the history of fluctuating sliding conditions in order to explain wear phenomena in the actual field.

Therefore, we concentrated on the accumulation of heat generated by friction, and current flow in the contact strip. We also proposed a method to estimate the contact temperature by accounting for the continuous changes in the condition of the wear surface (Figure 2). This method estimates the wear mode by considering the pantograph's sliding history, including sliding speed and collected current, as well as the installation configuration, such as contact wire stagger.
In the stationary test, we confirmed that the wear mode observed with continuously changing sliding speeds (Figure 3, upper row) matched the wear mode estimated from the contact temperature waveform obtained using this method (Figure 3, lower row).

In the future, this method will be developed into a predictive tool for wear progression in actual fields by integrating it with overhead contact line-pantograph simulations.
Additionally, we plan to use the results of this study to explore contact wire stagger configurations that prevent localized wear, based on the temperature of the contact strip.