Cantilever Modelling in the Railway Catenary Shape-Finding Problem

Catenary designers need accurate numerical simulation tools to improve the system performance, increase operational speed, minimize wear and prevent arcing. To obtain reliable results, the catenary numerical model must avoid over-simplifying the hypotheses, which significantly affect the outcome, even if this involves increasing the model’s complexity and computational cost.While the cantilevers that support the catenary wires are frequently omitted or over-simplified in many published studies, we incorporate the cantilevers into the catenary model to examine their impact on the static and dynamic behaviour of the catenary, and to develop a shape-finding procedure to include the cantilevers by a substructuring approach.For this we compared three scenarios: (i) a conventional catenary model without cantilevers, plus two other more realistic models that include the cantilevers: (ii) considering cantilever deformation in the geometric design, and (iii) disregarding cantilever deformation in the geometric design.The findings suggest that including the cantilevers reduces the stiffness of the system and produces a similar contact force. Although the two cantilever design options analysed result in slightly different initial catenary configurations, they also yield a very similar contact force. These findings therefore validate using simplified supports, provided they are appropriately calibrated, for which the proposed comprehensive cantilever model can be applied.