• Journal of Drive and Control
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.45-51
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• 2017

Semi-submersible drilling rigs are offshore plants that perform functions such as ocean exploration for oil and gas acquisition, drilling and production, and storage and unloading of crude oil and gas. Semi-submersible drilling rigs use watertight dampers as emergency buoyancy holders. Since the watertight damper is an emergency shutoff device, it is mainly driven by a pneumatic driving system that can operate without a power supply. The pneumatic driving system has highly non-linear characteristics due to compressibility of air and external disturbance such as static and Coulomb friction. In this paper, a new control algorithm is proposed for a watertight damper driving system based on the sliding mode control with a disturbance observer. To evaluate control performance and robust stability of the designed controller, the control results were compared with the results obtained using the state feedback controller. As a result, it was confirmed that the pneumatic driving system for driving the watertight damper using the sliding mode controller with a disturbance observer can obtain excellent control performance against the parameter changes and the disturbance input.