This paper presents a design of optimal controllers with respect to a meaningful cost function to force an underactuated omni-directional intelligent navigator (ODIN) under unknown constant environmental loads to track a reference trajectory in two-dimensional space. Motivated by the vehicle’s steering practice, the yaw angle regarded as a virtual control plus the surge thrust force are used to force the position of the vehicle to globally track its reference trajectory. The control design is based on several recent results developed for inverse optimal control and stability analysis of nonlinear systems, a new design of bounded disturbance observers, and backstepping and Lyapunov’s direct methods. Both state- and output-feedback control designs are addressed. Simulations are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results.
In this paper, graphical-user-interface (GUI) software for simulation and fuzzy-logic control of a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) using MATLAB™ GUI Designing Environment is proposed. The proposed ROV’s GUI platform allows the controller such as fuzzy-logic control systems design to be compared with other controllers such as proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and sliding-mode controller (SMC) systematically and interactively. External disturbance such as sea current can be added to improve the modelling in actual underwater environment. The simulated results showed the position responses of the fuzzy-logic control exhibit reasonable performance under the sea current disturbance.
This paper addresses the development and testing of a remotely controlled boat platform with an innovative air-ventilated hull. The application of air cavities on the underside of ship hulls is a promising means for reducing hydrodynamic drag and pollutant emissions and increasing marine transportation efficiency. Despite this concept’s potential, design optimization and high-performance operation of novel air-cavity ships remain a challenging problem. Hull construction and sensor instrumentation of the model-scale air-cavity boat is described in the paper. The modular structure of the hull allows for easy modifications, and an electric propulsion unit enables self-propelled operation. The boat is controlled remotely via a radio transmission system. Results of initial tests are reported, including thrust, speed, and airflow rate in several loading conditions. The constructed platform can be used for optimizing air-cavity systems and testing other innovative hull designs. This system can be also developed into a high-performance unmanned boat.
In the present paper a vibrational differential equation governing on a rigid beam on viscoelastic foundation has been investigated. The nonlinear differential equation governing on this vibrating system is solved by a simple and innovative approach, which has been called Akbari-Ganji’s method (AGM). AGM is a very suitable computational process and is usable for solving various nonlinear differential equations. Moreover, using AGM which solving a set of algebraic equations, complicated nonlinear equations can easily be solved without any mathematical operations. Also, the damping ratio and energy lost per cycle for three cycles have been investigated. Furthermore, comparisons have been made between the obtained results by numerical method (Runk45) and AGM. Results showed the high accuracy of AGM. The results also showed that by increasing the amount of initial amplitude of vibration (A), the value of damping ratio will be increased, and the energy lost per cycle decreases by increasing the number of cycle. It is concluded that AGM is a reliable and precise approach for solving differential equations. On the other hand, it is better to say that AGM is able to solve linear and nonlinear differential equations directly in most of the situations. This means that the final solution can be obtained without any dimensionless procedure. Therefore, AGM can be considered as a significant progress in nonlinear sciences.
The use of a glass-fiber reinforced composite in marine structures is becoming more common, particularly due to the potential weight savings. The mechanical response of the joint between a glass-fiber reinforced polymer (GRP) superstructure and a steel hull formed is examined and subsequently modified to improve performance through a combined program of modeling and testing. A finite-element model is developed to predict the response of the joint. The model takes into account the contact at the interface between different materials, progressive damage, large deformation theory, and a non-linear stress-strain relationship. To predict the progressive failure, the analysis combines Hashin failure criteria and maximum stress failure criteria. The results show stress response has a great influence on the strength and bearing of the joint. The Balsawood-steel interface is proved to be critical to the mechanical behavior of the joint. Good agreement between experimental results and numerical predictions is observed.
In recent years, as the composite laminated plates are widely used in engineering practice such as aerospace, marine and building engineering, the vibration problem of the composite laminated plates is becoming more and more important. Frequency, especially the fundamental frequency, has been considered as an important factor in vibration problem. In this paper, a calculation method of the fundamental frequency of arbitrary laminated plates under various boundary conditions is proposed. The vibration differential equation of the laminated plates is established at the beginning of this paper and the frequency formulae of specialty orthotropic laminated plates under various boundary conditions and antisymmetric angle-ply laminated plates with simply-supported edges are investigated. They are proved to be correct. Simple algorithm of the fundamental frequency for multilayer antisymmetric and arbitrary laminated plates under various boundary conditions is studied by a series of typical examples. From the perspective of coupling, when the number of laminated plates layers N > 8–10, some coupling influence on the fundamental frequency can be neglected. It is reasonable to use specialty orthotropic laminated plates with the same thickness but less layers to calculate the corresponding fundamental frequency of laminated plates. Several examples are conducted to prove correctness of this conclusion. At the end of this paper, the influence of the selected number of layers of specialty orthotropic laminates on the fundamental frequency is investigated. The accuracy and complexity are determined by the number of layers. It is necessary to use proper number of layers of special orthotropic laminates with the same thickness to simulate the fundamental frequency in different boundary conditions.
In this paper, towing tank experiments are conducted to study the behavior of flow on a model of the underwater vehicle with various shapes of bows, i.e. tango and standard bows in free surface motion tests. The total resistances for different Froude numbers are considered experimentally. The towing tank is equipped with a trolley that can operate in through 0.05–6 m/s speed with ±0.02 m/s accuracy. Furthermore, the study is done on hydrodynamic coefficients i.e. total, residual and friction resistance coefficients, and the results are compared. Finally, the study on flow of wave fields around bows is done and wave filed around two bows are compared. The Froude number interval is between 0.099 and 0.349. Blockage fraction for the model is fixed to 0.005 3. The results showed that the residual resistance of the standard bow in 0.19 to 0.3 Froude number is more than the tango bow in surface motion which causes more total resistance for the submarine. Finally, details of wave generated by the bow are depicted and the effects of flow pattern on resistance drag are discussed.
Although the upwind configuration is more popular in the field of wind energy, the downwind one is a promising type for the offshore wind energy due to its special advantages. Different configurations have different aerodynamic performance and it is important to predict the performance of both downwind and upwind configurations accurately for designing and developing more reliable wind turbines. In this paper, a numerical investigation on the aerodynamic performance of National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) phase VI wind turbine in downwind and upwind configurations is presented. The open source toolbox OpenFOAM coupled with arbitrary mesh interface (AMI) method is applied to tackle rotating problems of wind turbines. Two 3D numerical models of NREL phase VI wind turbine with downwind and upwind configurations under four typical working conditions of incoming wind velocities are set up for the study of different unsteady characteristics of the downwind and upwind configurations, respectively. Numerical results of wake vortex structure, time histories of thrust, pressure distribution on the blade and limiting streamlines which can be used to identify points of separation in a 3D flow are presented. It can be concluded that thrust reduction due to blade-tower interaction is small for upwind wind turbines but relatively large for downwind wind turbines and attention should be paid to the vibration at a certain frequency induced by the cyclic reduction for both configurations. The results and conclusions are helpful to analyze the different aerodynamic performance of wind turbines between downwind and upwind configurations, providing useful references for practical design of wind turbine.
Assuming linear theory, the two-dimensional problem of water wave scattering by a horizontal nearly circular cylinder submerged in infinitely deep water with an ice cover modeled as a thin-elastic plate floating on water, is investigated here. The cross-section of the nearly circular cylinder is taken as r=a(1+δC(θ)), where a is the radius of the corresponding circular cross-section of the cylinder, δ is a measure of small departure of the cross-section of the cylinder from its circularity and C(θ) is the shape function. Using a simplified perturbation technique the problem is reduced to two independent boundary value problems up to first order in δ. The first one corresponds to water wave scattering by a circular cylinder submerged in water with an ice-cover, while the second problem describes wave radiation by a submerged circular cylinder and involves first order correction to the reflection and transmission coefficients. The corrections are obtained in terms of integrals involving the shape function. Assuming a general Fourier expansion of the shape function, these corrections are evaluated approximately. It is well known that normally incident wave trains experience no reflection by a circular cylinder submerged in infinitely deep water with an ice cover. It is shown here that the reflection coefficient also vanishes up to first order for some particular choice of the shape function representing a nearly circular cylinder. For these cases, full transmission occurs, only change is in its phase which is depicted graphically against the wave number in a number of figures and appropriate conclusions are drawn.
The most critical issue in the steel catenary riser design is to evaluate the fatigue damage in the touchdown zone accurately. Appropriate modeling of the riser-soil resistance in the touchdown zone can lead to significant cost reduction by optimizing design. This paper presents a plasticity model that can be applied to numerically simulate riser-soil interaction and evaluate dynamic responses and the fatigue damage of a steel catenary riser in the touchdown zone. Utilizing the model, numerous riser-soil elements are attached to the steel catenary riser finite elements, in which each simulates local foundation restraint along the riser touchdown zone. The riser-soil interaction plasticity model accounts for the behavior within an allowable combined loading surface. The model will be represented in this paper, allowing simple numerical implementation. More importantly, it can be incorporated within the structural analysis of a steel catenary riser with the finite element method. The applicability of the model is interpreted theoretically and the results are shown through application to an offshore 8.625″ steel catenary riser example. The fatigue analysis results of the liner elastic riser-soil model are also shown. According to the comparison results of the two models, the fatigue life analysis results of the plasticity framework are reasonable and the horizontal effects of the riser-soil interaction can be included.
Scour depth prediction of offshore pipelines is of great significance to the design and construction of the submarine pipeline projects. In this paper, based on the CFD software package FLUENT and User Defined Function (UDF), an Eulerian two-phase model, which includes an Euler-Euler coupled model for water and sediment phases, and a turbulent model for the fluid phase, is adopted to predict the scour depth around pipelines. The model is verified by observation data obtained from laboratory experiments. On the basis of the simulations, the factors affecting the scour depth, including the effects of incipient velocity, pipe diameter and sediment particle size and so on, were investigated. Meanwhile, according to formulas of incipient velocity of various sediments, approximate calculation on theoretical scour depths is developed for pipelines of seven stations in the South China Sea, where engineering application information is available.
This paper presents a simulator model of a marine diesel engine based on physical, semi-physical, mathematical and thermodynamic equations, which allows fast predictive simulations. The whole engine system is divided into several functional blocks: cooling, lubrication, air, injection, combustion and emissions. The sub-models and dynamic characteristics of individual blocks are established according to engine working principles equations and experimental data collected from a marine diesel engine test bench for SIMB Company under the reference 6M26SRP1. The overall engine system dynamics is expressed as a set of simultaneous algebraic and differential equations using sub-blocks and S-Functions of Matlab/Simulink. The simulation of this model, implemented on Matlab/Simulink has been validated and can be used to obtain engine performance, pressure, temperature, efficiency, heat release, crank angle, fuel rate, emissions at different sub-blocks. The simulator will be used, in future work, to study the engine performance in faulty conditions, and can be used to assist marine engineers in fault diagnosis and estimation (FDI) as well as designers to predict the behavior of the cooling system, lubrication system, injection system, combustion, emissions, in order to optimize the dimensions of different components. This program is a platform for fault simulator, to investigate the impact on sub-blocks engine’s output of changing values for faults parameters such as: faulty fuel injector, leaky cylinder, worn fuel pump, broken piston rings, a dirty turbocharger, dirty air filter, dirty air cooler, air leakage, water leakage, oil leakage and contamination, fouling of heat exchanger, pumps wear, failure of injectors (and many others).
In continuation of the extensive studies carried out to update the corrosion map of India, in this study, the degradation of mild steel by air pollutants was studied at 16 different locations from Nagore to Ammanichatram along the east coast of Tamilnadu, India over a period of two years. The weight loss study showed that the mild steel corrosion was more at Nagapattinam site, when compared to Ammanichatram and Maravakadu sites. A linear regression analysis of the experimental data was attempted to predict the mechanism of the corrosion. The composition of the corrosion products formed on the mild steel surfaces was identified by XRD technique. The corrosion rate values obtained are discussed in the light of the weathering parameters, atmospheric pollutants such as salt content & SO2 levels in the atmosphere, corrosion products formed on the mild steel surfaces.