Virtual prototyping for maritime winch design and operations based on functional mock-up interface co-simulation

ABSTRACT

Modern winch systems have become increasingly complex with hybrid power systems, intelligent control systems, and lightweight synthetic cables with complicated traction and handling mechanisms. During the early design phase, it is hard to manage a large set of parameters for system design exploration and optimisation by traditional trial-and-error approaches. Virtual prototyping provides the users with numerous risk-free possibilities to evaluate the design trade-offs and immediately know the results of any modification. This requires flexible, effective modelling of the dynamic system and efficient handling of the simulation. This paper presents the implementation of a virtual winch prototyping tool for maritime winch design and operations. Model development and setups for co-simulation are described based on an active heave compensated winch with secondary control. Simulation management and user interface are implemented based on web technology and connected to the functional mock-up units as clients through the WebSocket protocol.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual prototyping
• maritime winch
• FMI co-simulation
• hydraulic
• secondary control
• active heave compensation

Acknowledgement

The project is financially supported by the GCE Blue Maritime Cluster Innovation, with project ‘Virtual Prototyping System for Maritime Winch Operation’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Yingguang Chu received his PhD degree in Marine Technology in 2018 with Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. He has a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Automation from Beijing Technology and Business University, China, in 2007 and a M.Sc. degree in Product and System Design from Aalesund University College, Norway, in 2013. From 2010 to 2011, he studied the M.Sc. programme in Hydraulic Engineering at Ocean University of China. Since 2018, Dr. Chu works as Research Scientist with Sintef Ålesund AS. His research interests include mechanical design, hydraulics, robotics, modelling and simulation of dynamic operation systems, and virtual prototyping. He has published several papers and articles in international conferences and journals within these areas.

Birger Skogeng Pedersen received his B.Sc. degree in Automation Engineering from Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Aalesund, Norway, in 2015. He currently continues with his M.Sc. study in Simulation and Visualisation with Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Aalesund, Norway. From 2015 to 2018, he has worked as Research Assistant at Mechatronics Lab at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Mr. Pedersen is currently working as a Control Systems Engineer at Optimar AS.

Professor Houxiang Zhang, D.Sc. received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical and electronic engineering from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, in 2003. From 2004 to 2011, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems, Department of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Zhang joined the Department of Ocean Operations and Civil Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Aalesund, Norway, since April 2011, where he is a full professor on robotics and cybernetics. Currently, he also has a gift professorship on product and system design from the industry. Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on maritime operation and mobile robotics. In these areas, he has published over 150 journal and conference papers and book chapters as author or co-author. He received the best paper award at the IEEE/AEME AIM2008 conference, and three finalist awards for best conference paper at IEEE Robotics and Automation conferences.

Additional information

Funding

The project is financially supported by grants from the Research Council of Norway with the SFI MOVE (project no. 237929) and the MAROFF KPN “Digital Twins for Vessel Life Cycle Service” (project no. 280703).