Keywords: railway catenary systems, pantograph-catenary interaction, modal analysis, structural dynamics, system identification, laboratory investigation, pantograph.

Identifying the fundamental frequencies and modal parameters of a system is of great importance for understanding it, and to analyse its behaviour. It is also very important for knowing and acknowledging the limitations of numerical models of the structure. The pantograph is such a structure. It is a quite complex dynamic system which configuration is of great importance for the dynamics of the pantograph-catenary interaction. To better understand the behaviour a pantograph has been put in a laboratory, instrumented with many accelerometers attached at carefully chosen positions, and using experimental system identification by a stepped sine sweep excitation. The first aim is to do a full system identification using this method. The second is to optimize the procedure by reducing the number of accelerometers or channels according to wanted output. The study has important findings regarding the frequency content of the pantograph, which components that are being influenced by which frequency, and procedure for telling how many accelerometers to use and where to place them in a similar study.

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