Assessment of catenary condition monitoring by means of pantograph head acceleration and Artificial Neural Networks

Measuring the pantograph–catenary interaction force is crucial for homologation and maintenance purposes. However, this is an intricate procedure that requires a specially-instrumented pantograph. As an alternative to the traditional method of measuring the interaction force, we propose in this paper a new procedure to predict the current collection quality (usually quantified by the standard deviation of the interaction force) from the vertical acceleration measurements of the pantograph collector head.