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Week 2 (June 12-16)

Several pairs of current collectors were available for us to use.  The current collectors are mounted on the bogie and used to pick up the electricity from the wayside power rails.  The current wayside power rails are made by hot-gluing and screwing copper rails into cut-open PVC pipes that serve as insulation.  However, this design of the power rails does not create a smooth enough power rail for the current collector to glide along.  The company that manufactured the current collectors, Kyec, also sells insulated copper rails that were made specifically for the Kyec current collectors to easily glide through.  However, due to the expensive cost and the great amount of time it would take for delivery, we decided to figure out a way to fix the existing power rails.  The main reason why the power rails are not smooth enough is because of how the copper rails are connected at the joints. Two copper rails are overlapped and a single screws holds both rails together, as shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1:  How the cooper rails are currently connected. (Drawn by Tan Ho)


The current collectors also have to be modified to work with the power rails.  The joints of the rails may have slight protrusions from screws that join together two sections of copper rail.  These protrusions cannot be easily fixed without completely removing all the rails and redesigning a new one.  Therefore, the surface area of the copper collector shoe is increased by sandwiching the shoe with two copper peices.  This ensures contact with the power rails at all times.  The modified shoe also has a sled-shape profile, so that it can glide through any protrusions that it encounters on the power rails.  The modified collector shoe is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2:  Modified current collector.  (Photo by Andrew Lu)

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