Introduction to Engineering Softwares
Spotting Simulator
Alucast’s catenary design software is a powerful and complete software for automatic design of overhead contact line and checking the correctness or incorrectness of a designed catenary design. It designs the optimized catenary design according to environment condition (maximum and minimum temperature, wind speed, etc.), line's topography (route radius, position of poles, span length, etc.) and overhead contact line specifications (stagger, tensile force for contact and catenary wires, geometry of the array, etc.). The software is able to survey all necessary parameters and international standards in the field of electrical railway for an accomplished catenary design in terms of overhead contact line and monitoring of the all technical errors.
Cantilever Calculations
Cantilevers support contact wire and messenger wire. Cantilever calculations need accurate, complex, and time consuming calculations because of existence: ice load, wind load, weight of wires and fitting, etc.
Cantilever Calculations software draws cantilever schematically with entering the geometric information. Cantilever strength is investigated simply by doing changes in cantilever geometric.
Dropper Calculation Tool
In recent years, electrification train industry has made significant progress in Iran. With the advancement of this industry, it is felt to need increase the speed of the lines. At high speeds of the train, maintenance of the stable connection of the current from the contact wire to the pantograph is essential for optimal transmission of power. The interaction between the pantograph and the catenary system is one of the most important issues involved in high-speed of overhead contact line. In order to achieve the best performance of the pantograph and catenary system, accurate calculations of the dropper length are necessary. In order to calculate the dropper length, it is first necessary to make static calculations that it requires a precise mechanical calculation of the overhead contact line to increase the speed of the train.
The main task of droppers is to connect the contact wire and the messenger wire to keep the contact wire parallel with the ground for uniform connection with pantograph so that it allows contact wire to have desired and desirable sag. While the pantograph must not be disconnected from the contact wire, the upward force of the pantograph must not be too high to prevent the rapid wear of the contact wire. The distance between the droppers and their length determines the distribution of uniform elasticity in the catenary system, which requires accurate and complex calculations. In order to perform the dynamic simulation of the interaction between the catenary system-pantograph and verifying the standard EN 50318, accurate calculation of dropper length is necessary. This is another reason for the high importance of dropper length calculations. It looks impossible to get favorable result in dynamic simulation without access to dropper calculations.
Dynamic Simulation
Increasing the train speed is one of the most important issues in OCS that it needs more accurate calculations for catenary system. Verifying a catenary system for a considered speed is performed through two ways:
| 1) Test in real scale (A Costly and time-consuming way) |
| 2) Simulating interaction between catenary system and pantograph |
So for designing an OCS and verifying it, simulating interaction between pantograph and catenary system is necessary. Contact between pantograph and catenary system is an important section in the field of transition of power in trains with high speed. Moreover, forecasting exact behavior of elasticity is possible only through dynamic simulation that it shows other aspect of importance of dynamic simulation in OCS. At the papers, it is mentioned to importance and complexity of dynamic simulation times. For validating the simulation, it needs to satisfy EN 50318 standard. The Alucast company is achieved this job by insisting on Iranian young engineers.