Published on January 2019 | Marine Salvage, Artificial Intelligence

Design of a supervisory fuzzy logic controller for monitoring the inflow and purging of gas through lift bags for a safe and viable salvaging operation

This paper presents a mathematical model and numerical time-domain approach to simulate the dynamics of a sunken ship/vessel being raised from seafloor by buoyancy (gas-inflating) systems in a form which is suitable for integrating control techniques to ensure hydrodynamic stability for a safe and viable salvaging operation. According to the two-degree-of-freedom equations of rigid-body vessel motion in diving plane, a conventional sliding mode controller is designed as the primary controller to regulate flow rate of filling gas inside the lift bags and a PID controller is designed as the secondary controller for regulating the purging of gas through the valves fitted on lift bags. Then a supervisory fuzzy logic controller is designed to monitor or switch between the primary and secondary controllers based on the buoyancy requirement. From the simulation studies, it is found that the supervisory fuzzy logic controller is capable to maintain hydrodynamic stability by suitably defining the linguistic fuzzy rules, which is created based on the author's experience in conducting numerical simulation using primary and secondary controllers.