Active Control Strategy of Pantograph Coupling with Rigid Catenary Considering the Time Delay in Sensor and Actuator

The research on active control of the pantograph has been intensively studied, however, the control results in practice are not satisfactory as expected, for the existence of time delays coming from the input and output measurement. This paper focuses on the problem of time delays in the designing of the control strategy, including the sensor signal input and the action of the actuator. A multibody dynamic pantograph model is established based on the relative coordinate method, combined with the rigid catenary established by the modal superposition method. Firstly, the performance of the traditional PID controller with signal time delay is studied, including the separation or combination of sensor signal input delay and actuator signal output delay. Then, a novel fuzzy PID controller with an improved rule library is proposed, which further improves the control performance of the PID controller. Finally, to deal with the time delay of sensor and actuator well, a dynamic predictive fuzzy adaptive PID (DMC-Fuzzy-PID) controller is proposed by combining dynamic matrix control (DMC) with the improved fuzzy PID controller, which may support the engineering application of active control of pantograph.KeywordsActive controlTime delayRigid catenaryMultibody dynamicsFuzzy PID controller