Raft attitude control and elastic deformation suppression technique for large-scale floating raft air spring mounting system

The structure of floating rafts-equipped vessels will be inevitably undermined due to application of large-scale designs. When encountering strong external disturbances, not only the rafts will deviate from the original balanced position but also greater elastic deformation will be generated, which may lead to the relative displacement between devices on rafts and endanger the operation safety of equipment. In this study, a class of raft elastic deformation monitoring and discrimination methods is put forward via analyzing the features of large-scale raft elastic deformation. Air springs layout is optimized through finite element method (FEM). A flexible raft control responding model is established and a novel raft elastic deformation suppression technique is proposed based on air spring pressure parameter identification that adjusts the air spring pressure distribution. The experimental results indicate that this technique can effectively control the attitude of the rafts and reduce elastic deformation, leading to a largely improved control precision and a faster convergence speed of the raft.