Adaptive vibration control of a flexible marine riser via the backstepping technique and disturbance adaptation

This paper proposes an adaptive boundary control for vibration suppression of a flexible marine riser system. The dynamic model of the riser system is described in the form of a nonlinear nonhomogeneous hyperbolic partial differential equation and four ordinary differential equations. In a proper mathematical manner, the backstepping technique, Lyapunov's direct method, and the adaptive technique are utilized to design an adaptive boundary control for the vibration suppression of the riser system, and also for the global stabilization of the riser within a small neighbourhood of its original position. In addition, a parameter adaptive law is designed to compensate for the system parametric uncertainties and a disturbance adaptation law is proposed to eliminate the effects of boundary disturbance. The uniformly bounded stability of the closed-loop riser system is achieved through rigorous Lyapunov analysis with no discretization or simplification of the partial differential equation dynamics model of the system. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.