2017 Volume 62 Issue 2 Pages 137-143
Wear resistance is required for current collecting materials such as a contact wire and pantograph contact strip because lives of these materials are determined mainly by wear. Conventionally, contact wire and contact strip have been developed independently each other, and there is no concept to reduce wear of them by combining material properties. In this paper, the authors suggest a map which shows tendency of respective wear mode occurrence against any material combination by using a melting point and an electric resistivity. Based on the map, the authors select the wear specimens as nickel for imitation contact wire and iron-based sintered alloy for contact strip so that a melting wear mode of contact wire would not be occurred. As the result of wear test, the melting wear mode and large wear rate of contact wire could not be observed in any load condition as expected. Finally, the authors indicated the possibility of wear mode control for wear reduction measure by combining current collecting materials.