Modeling and Boundary Control of a Hanging Cable Immersed in Water

A nonlinear distributed parameter system model governing the motion of a cable with an attached payload immersed in water is derived. The payload is subject to a drag force due to a constant water stream velocity. Such a system is found, for example, in deep sea oil exploration, where a crane mounted on a ship is used for construction and thus positioning of underwater parts of an offshore drilling platform. The equations of motion are linearized, resulting in two coupled, one-dimensional wave equations with spatially varying coefficients and dynamic boundary conditions of second order in time. The wave equations model the normal and tangential displacements of cable elements, respectively. A two degree of freedom controller is designed for this system with a Dirichlet input at the boundary opposite to the payload. A feedforward controller is designed by inverting the system using a Taylor-series, which is then truncated. The coupling is ignored for the feedback design, allowing for a separate design for each direction of motion. Transformations are introduced, in order to transform the system into a cascade of a partial differential equation (PDE) and an ordinary differential equation (ODE), and PDE backstepping is applied. Closed-loop stability is proven. This is supported by simulation results for different cable lengths and payload masses. These simulations also illustrate the performance of the feedforward controller.