The influence of wind load modelling in the dynamic simulation of overhead catenary lines

Abstract

Overhead catenary lines (OCL) are subjected to different loads, both those due to the interaction with the pantograph and those others mostly meteorological. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamic response of a flexible cable structure subjected to different wind models. While some wind load models assume a normal distribution of the speed, some others include more realistically the stochastic nature of the phenomenon. Wind speed has the property of intermittency, i.e. at different temporal scales the behaviour of its distribution is consequently different too. Whereas at a large temporal scale wind velocity increments can be considered normal-distributed, at small temporal scales they fit better to normal inverse Gaussian distributions. Therefore, this paper presents a stochastic model of wind loads whose random component is calculated from a non-Gaussian Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, which is able to reflect the change of wind load distribution at different temporal scales.