Modelling and control of offshore crane systems
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2015
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Cranes are widely used in transportation, construction and manufacturing. Suspended payloads in crane system are caused to swing due to actuator movement, external disturbance such as wind flows, and motion of the crane base in the case of portable cranes. Recently, offshore cranes have become a new trend in stevedoring and in offshore construction as they can help to avoid port congestion and also to exploit ocean engineering applications. For crane operations, it is important to satisfy rigorous requirements in terms of safety, accuracy and efficiency. One of the main challenges in crane operations has been identified as the sway motion control, which is subject to underactuation of crane drive systems and external disturbances. Particularly in offshore cranes, the harsh conditions can produce exogenous disturbances during the load transfer at various scenarios of offshore crane operations in practice. Therefore, it is interesting as to how to design robust controllers to guarantee high performance in the face of disturbances and parameter variations in offshore cranes.
The motivation for this thesis is based on recent growing research interest in the derivation of dynamic models and development of control techniques for offshore cranes in the presence of, for example, the rope length variation, sway, ocean waves and strong winds in offshore crane systems. Accordingly, the work for this thesis has been conducted in the two main themes, namely analytical modelling and control design, for which new results represent its contributions.
Dynamic models of two types of offshore crane systems, namely the offshore gantry crane and offshore boom crane, are derived in the presence of vessel’s ocean wave-induced motion. The effect of wind disturbances on the payload sway is also considered in the modelling. In the control context, sliding mode control techniques for a generic form of underactuated mechanical Lagrangian systems are presented, including the conventional first-order, second-order and adaptive fuzzy sliding mode controllers. The major component in this part of the thesis is the design of sliding mode control laws based on the developed offshore crane models for trajectory tracking problems, in the presence of persistent disturbances in severe open-sea conditions. Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the models and robustness of the designed controllers.
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