Hybrid active and passive control of a very large floating beam structure

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel hybrid active and passive control method for very large floating structure (VLFS) to reduce the hydroelastic response, such that the resulting controlled VLFS can enhance its serviceability on the whole area. The floating beam structure is described as a distributed parameter system with partial differential equation (PDE). According to Lyapunov stability principle, a hybrid active and passive controller is designed to suppress the vibration of VLFS for the improvement in serviceability. In the active control design, two boundary controllers are developed to act on the upstream and downstream ends of VLFS, respectively. In passive control design, passive control components with high elastic rigidities are used to absorb the dynamic energy of VLFS from waves. Numerical simulations with comparison to the existing active control method are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method. The parametric studies are given to examine the effects of various parameters to the vibration response of VLFS.