Abstract
The energy saving is one of the most important factors for profit in marine transportation. In order to reduce the fuel oil consumtion the ship's propulsion efficiency must be increased as possible. The propulsion efficiency depends upon a combination of an engine and a propeller. The propeller has better efficiency as lower rotational speed. This situation led the engine manufacturers to design the engine that has low speed, long stroke and a small number of cylinders. Consequently, the variation of rotational torque became larger than before because of the longer delay-time in fuel oil injection process and an increased output per cylinder. As this new trends the conventional mechanical-hydrualic governors for engine speed control have been replaced by digital speed controllers which adopted the PID control or the optimal control algorithm. But these control algorithms have not enough robustness to suppress the variation of the delay-time and the parameter perturbation. In this paper we consider the delay-time and the perturbation of engine parameters as the modeling uncetainties. Next we design the robust servo controller which has zero offset in steady state engine speed, based on H sub($\infty$) control theory. The validity of the controller was investigated through the response simulation. We used a personal computer and an analog computer as the digital controller and the engine (plant) part respectively. And, we could certify that the designed controller maintains its robust servo performance even though the engine parameters may vary.
