Abstract
In a joint venture the French, Belgium, and Netherlands Navies have designed a mine-hunter and the prototype is now under construction at a French Naval Dockyard.
Precision-manoeuvring was a firm design requirement. To achieve the design goals, a thruster sizing study was carried out to establish the required thruster sizes.
Automatic and manual control in the hover-mode (hovering means position keeping) were studied to compare the positioning accuracies in both cases and to establish the need for an automatic position keeping system. Navigators of all three navies performed a one week simulation exercise to define the precision in the hovering mode under manual control. These navigators were experienced mine-hunter officers. Their scores were significantly inferior to the score under automatic control, which led to the incorporation of an automatic control system in the design. A further advantage is that automatic control saves man power, in the sense that the operator can do additional jobs, while the automatic controller steers the ship.
Results of static and dynamic simulations are presented together with the comparison between automatic and manual control.
Finally the automatic trackkeeping control system will be described and some simulation results of trackkeeping under various external influences (wind, sea and current conditions) will be given.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.