Abstract
For railways speed up such as 350km/h, it is particularly important to reduce noise caused by current collector for environmental problem. For a solution, a diamond shaped low-noise current collector has been developed. However, it becomes difficult for the current collector to maintain the predetermined contact force between the contact strip and the trolley-wire. Therefore, it is necessary to apply the active control to keep the contact force uniform. However, there is a serious problem for the active control that it is difficult to put sensors in high voltage region. In this paper, an application of plastic optical fiber sensor is devised and it is applied to the control system. In the experiment, the usefulness of the proposed sensor and control system is demonstrated.