Influence of clamp and wear depth on stress distribution and fatigue life of high-speed railway contact wires

HUANG Jie; ZHANG Jiawei; GUAN Jinfa; ZHANG Jiwang; SU Kaixin; XU Kejia

doi:10.16579/j.issn.1001.9669.2026.07.002

Abstract：[Objective]High-speed railway contact wires are exposed to the risk of fatigue failure during service.Deterioration of current quality at the clamp position causes severe wear of the contact wire,making this area a high-incidence region for fatigue failure.It is of important engineering significance to investigate the effects of clamps and wear depth on the stress distribution and fatigue life of contact wires.[Methods]Firstly,taking the contact wire at the clamp position as the research object,a dynamic simulation model of the pantograph-catenary coupling system and a hybrid catenary model with solid elements for clamps and contact wires were established.Secondly,stress analysis was carried out on the contact wire without clamps and the clamped contact wires with different wear rates(0％,14％,19％).Finally,high-cycle fatigue tests of contact wire materials within 107 cycles were conducted,and fatigue life prediction was performed based on the stress analysis results.[Results]The results show that the proposed hybrid catenary model can accurately and intuitively present the stress distribution of the contact wire at the clamp position.Compared with the beam-element catenary model,this model can capture more detailed stress time history.Obvious stress concentration occurs on the contact wire at both ends of the clamp,and the stress concentration becomes more significant with the increase of wear depth.The existence of clamps remarkably shortens the fatigue life of the contact wires,and ignoring the influence of clamps will lead to an overestimated fatigue life.The fatigue life of the contact wire shortens with the increase of wear depth,and the greater the wear depth,the faster the life shortening of the contact wire.