Robust adaptive horizontal vibration isolation of towed seismic streamers

The horizontal vibration of towed seismic streamers is a main reason for efficiency reduction of the seismic survey and tail tangling. A vibration suppression scheme of towed seismic streamers is investigated in this paper. The towed seismic streamer is divided into two spans, a controlled span, i.e., the low tension span, and an uncontrolled span, i.e., the high tension span, by a bird. The system model includes a hyperbolic partial differential equation with variable coefficient describing the towed seismic streamers, and an ordinary differential equation describing the dynamic of bird. Robust based-model knowledge and adaptive controllers, based on the Lyapunov method, are designed to isolate the vibration of towed seismic streamers caused by the course deviations of towing vessel, the variations of towing vessel velocity and the variations of towed seismic streamer density. The robust based-model knowledge and adaptive controllers exponentially and asymptotically drive the span-towed seismic streamer displacement to zero, respectively. A finite difference scheme is used to validate the efficiency of the control law. The proposed controller can isolate effectively the disturbance originated from the towed vessel, and can provide the improved damping but not sacrifice the isolation performance. The adaptive scheme can tolerate the lack of knowledge of some uncertain parameters and can directly execute the online adjustment of the parameters. Meanwhile, the proposed control law is robust and can resist the model uncertainty due to parameter incertitude, model error and unknown disturbance and so on. The control law only includes velocity and slope, while it does not need the displacement which is difficult to measure in the practical operations. Thus it is easy to implement.