Author(s)

Y Fujii & S Katayama

Abstract

To reduce the total contact loss of a train, pantographs are connected by high voltage cables, which makes a closed circuit with the contact wire, pantographs and high voltage cables. Owing to this closed circuit, even though a pantograph breaks contact, the arc generated by contact loss extinguishes within some time if other pantographs are in contact with the contact wire, and the voltage appearing between the contact-broken pantograph and the contact wire is lower than the minimum arc voltage. From quantitative investigations on the arc extinction time which depends on the closed circuit constants and pantograph currents just before contact loss, we have found a fact that the arc extinction time is proportional to the product of closed circuit inductances and pantograph currents just before contact loss; the calculated arc extinction time agrees well with the experimental time in the region where the arc extinction time is shorter than 16ms.

Keywords