A heave compensation system is an absolutely necessary instrument for secure mining operations. The system is too large to do the testing in field, and so hardware-in-the-loop simulation is used for designing the system and developing the control strategy. The hardware-in-the-loop simulation system is composed of a mathematical model and physical models based on the model test installation of heave compensation. The math model developed by VC runs on the host computer. The physical models includes mining ship motion simulator, gimbal mount for pitch and roll compensation, sensors for attitude measure and the controller. The controller is PXIe from National Instruments and works as a slave computer. The visual monitoring system is realized by OpenGL.
At present, the pipeline lifting mining system is the most popular mining system. The nodules collected by the miner are lifted by the fluid rising force through the lifting pipeline to the mining ship. Under the sea wave, the lifting pipeline moves with the motion of mining ship, which causes large axial stress on lifting pipeline. To make mining operation secure, a heave compensation system is absolutely necessary. In fact, the heave compensation system is too large to do the tests in field. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation system is put forward. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation can be found as early as 1960s for missile weapon system. The army simulation center (ASC) of redstone arsenal in Alabama constructed a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system of missile control to validate the control equipment design, mechanical design and simulation results (Gu, 1995). A hardware-inthe- loop simulation system for spacecraft docking system was set up in Johnson Space Center of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (Ananthakrishnan, 1996). Stewart platform and feed forward filter method based on prediction were used to analyze dynamic characteristics.
