THE DECOUPLED CUSHION CONTROL IN RIDE CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR AIR CUSHION CATAMARANS

摘要

A well-known limit of air cushion catamarans is the so-called "cobblestone effect", a resonance phenomenon due to the interaction between the ship body and the air cushion dynamics excited by the incoming waves. In this paper the problem of designing a Ride Control System for the attenuation of the wave-induced vertical accelerations of a Surface Effect Ship (SES) is considered. It is shown that the damping of two basic resonant modes can be achieved by two independent control loops. Such a decoupled control scheme exploits the intrinsic orthogonality of the two oscillation phenomena.