Research On Integrated Control System Of Multiple-drum Marine Towing Winch

Multiple-drum marine towing winch is one of the most important equipment in a marine towing system and plays an important role in oceanographic research and ocean resource surveys. Based on the fact that a multiple marine towing winch needs a lot of actuators to control all the drums, this paper proposed the design scheme of an automated, integrated and intelligent control system, which is of great value in both academic research and engineering application.This paper is written regarding on the hardware and software development of the integrated control system, as well as the design of an off-line experiment platform for the system. The main contents of this paper are summarized as following:(1) The modular design of the hardware system. The main control unit of the hardware system was designed with a 32-bit micro-controller as the basis. It works with other functional modules which are embedded with microcomputer systems to complete all the communication, input and output tasks.(2) The development of the software system. This section depicts the overall structure and flow of the software system, completing the software designs for all the modules with a microcomputer system and the user interface design based on a touch screen.(3) The control algorithm research of the towing winch. Based on simulation and experiment, the control of balancing head and wire line system have been studied using PID control algorithm and fuzzy logic control algorithm, respectively.(4) An off-line experiment platform for the integrated control system has been designed for testing and further improvement.