A Study on Deveolpment of Fatigue Tester Simulating Operating Condition for the Dropper of Overhead Catenary System

초록

The Dropper enables the overhead contact wire to supply the electricity stably by supporting the overhead contact wire and maintaining it in a horizontal position. The Dropper consists of wire rope and clampers connecting the wire rope with messenger wire and contact wire. During the operation, the droppers are exposed to repeated mechanical bending and tensile stresses caused by the passage of pantographs of trains running in high speed. From the previous researches investigating the failures of droppers in real operation, various failure cases have been reported including clampers and wire ropes. Therefore, it is highly necessary to develop test device and method of dropper which can simulate real operate condition (repeated bending and tensile). Thus, in this study, real operating conditions of droppers were analyzed by investigating previous researches and the test device of dropper was developed. Also, fatigue characteristics of droppers were evaluated using the developed test device. Fatigue tests on the droppers (applied to the trains operating up to 150km/h) were conducted at high stress condition for accelerated test.