Crane Dynamics with Modulated Hoisting

For many types of cranes commonly used in technical applications, the reduction of payload pendulations is an important design issue. Especially for cranes with variable cable length, oscillations are boosted by the hoisting of the payload due to nonlinear effects. Most of the techniques for active damping are based on a control input that displaces the support of the hoisting mechanism perpendicularly to the direction of the pendulum. However, controlled motion of the carrying structure might not be suitable or even impossible for some applications. The possibility to influence and reduce pendulations by means of feedback controlled variations of the cable length is hardly used in crane technology. A control strategy based on the phenomenon of autoparametric resonances in nonlinear dynamical systems is presented that manipulates the desired hoisting velocity by superposition of a suitably modulated motion in order to reduce amplifications of the pendulations, in particular in absence of other effective control inputs. Experimental results for a simple pendulum setup are presented. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)