Abstract
For safety critical offshore operations, the dynamically positioned (DP) vessel should maintain reasonable positioning performance even under the circumstance of thruster failure. In this case, thruster failure mode analysis is often taken into account when designing a new DP vessel. In this paper, the positioning performances of the vessels with thruster failure modes are investigated by time domain simulations. A novel synthesized positioning performance criterion is proposed to quantify the positioning performance including the aspects of positioning accuracy and power consumption. The synthesized criterion concerns how well the vessel is positioned rather than how large the environmental conditions that the vessel can counteract. A semi-submersible employed with eight azimuth thrusters is adopted to perform the simulation. It can be concluded from the obtained results that, if the thruster system is well designed, thruster failure may not affect the thrust system in supplying sufficient thrust force with two or less than two thrusters failure for the semi-submersible. With four thrusters failure, the thrust system tries its best to counteract the environmental yaw moment in order to keep its heading, however, it cannot supply sufficient forces to assist the semi-submersible going back to its desired position, which is very dangerous in practical operation. Therefore, the failed thrusters should be timely maintained to guarantee safe operation and to save power. The performance of the thrust re-allocation logic dealing with thruster failure during the simulation is also approved. Finally, several design guideline regarding improvement of the positioning performance of the vessel after thruster failure have been summarized.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brink A, Chung JS (1981) Automatic position control of a 300,000 tons ship during ocean mining operations. In: Offshore technology conference. Offshore Technology Conference
Chen H, Moan T, Verhoeven H (2008) Safety of dynamic positioning operations on mobile offshore drilling units. Reliab Eng Syst Saf 93(7):1072–1090
Faltinsen OM (1990) Sea loads on ships and offshore structures. Cambridge University Press
Faÿ H (1990) Dynamic positioning systems: principles. Design and Applications, Technip
Fossen TI (2011) Handbook of marine craft hydrodynamics and motion control. Wiley, New York
Fossen TI, Strand JP (1999) Passive nonlinear observer design for ships using lyapunov methods: full-scale experiments with a supply vessel. Automatica 35(1):3–16
Fu M, Ning J, Wei Y (2011) Fault-tolerant control of dynamic positioning vessel by means of a virtual thruster. In: Mechatronics and automation (ICMA), 2011 international conference on IEEE, pp 1706–1710
Johansen TA, Fossen TI, Berge SP (2004) Constrained nonlinear control allocation with singularity avoidance using sequential quadratic programming. Control Syst Techn IEEE Trans 12(1):211–216
Morgan MJ (1978) Dynamic positioning of offshore vessels. Petroage Publishing Co
Serraris J-J (2009) Time domain analysis for dp simulations. In: ASME 2009 28th international conference on Ocean, offshore and Arctic engineering. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, pp 595–605
Skjetne R, Egeland O (2006) Hardware-in-the-loop testing of marine control systems. Model Identif Control 27(4):239–258
Sørensen AJ (2011) A survey of dynamic positioning control systems. Annu Rev Control 35(1):123–136
Sørensen AJ, Ronxss M (2002) Mathematical modeling of dynamically positioned and thruster-assisted anchored marine vessels. Ocean Eng Handb 1:15–28
Sørensen AJ, Strand JP (2000) Positioning of small-waterplane-area marine constructions with roll and pitch damping. Control Eng Pract 8(2):205–213
Spjtvold J, Johansen TA (2009) Fault tolerant control allocation for a thruster-controlled floating platform using parametric programming. In: Decision and control, 2009 held jointly with the 2009 28th Chinese control conference. CDC/CCC 2009. Proceedings of the 48th IEEE conference on IEEE, pp 3311–3317
Tannuri E, Pesce C, Alves G, Masetti I, Ribas Ferreira P, Umeda C (2002) Dynamic positioning of a pipeline launching barge. In: The twelfth international offshore and polar engineering conference. International society of offshore and polar engineers
Wichers JEW (1988) A simulation model for a single point moored tanker. Ph.D. thesis, Technische Universiteit Delft
Xu S, Li B, Wang X, Wang L (2016a) A novel real-time estimate method of wave drift force for wave feed-forward in dynamic positioning system. Ships Offshore Struct 11(7):747–756
Xu S, Wang L, Wang X (2015a) Local optimization of thruster configuration based on a synthesized positioning capability criterion. Int J Nav Archit Ocean Eng 7(6):1044–1055
Xu S, Wang L, Wang X, Li B (2016b) Experimental evaluation on a newly developed dynamic positioning time domain simulation program. J Ship Mech 20(03):265–276
Xu S, Wang X, Wang L, Li B et al (2016c) A dynamic forbidden sector skipping strategy in thrust allocation for marine vessels. Int J Offshore Polar Eng 26(2):175–182
Xu S, Wang X, Wang L, Meng S, Li B (2015b) A thrust sensitivity analysis based on a synthesized positioning capability criterion in DPCap/DynCap analysis for marine vessels. Ocean Eng 108:164–172
Xu X, Yang J, Li X, Xu L (2015c) Time-domain simulation for coupled motions of three barges moored side-by-side in floatover operation. China Ocean Eng 29:155–168
Yamamoto I (2001) Robust and non-linear control of marine system. Int J Robust Nonlinear Control 11(13):1285–1341
Yamamoto I (2016) Practical robotics and mechatronics: marine, space and medical applications. The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Acknowledgements
The authors greatly acknowledge the supports of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51709170), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (Mooring position technology: floating support platform engineering(II)), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFC0303405) and the Shanghai Sailing Program (Grant No. 17YF1409700).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
Xu, S., Wang, X., Wang, L. et al. Investigation of the positioning performances for DP vessels considering thruster failure modes by a novel synthesized criterion. J Mar Sci Technol 23, 605–619 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00773-017-0496-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00773-017-0496-0