Residual vibration suppression of an under-water fuel transport system

This paper discusses the residual vibration suppression problem of a nuclear fuel transport system (FTS). The FTS is supposed to transport the fuel rods under-water to the desired locations within the plant in the minimum possible time. It has been observed that the rods oscillate at the end of such brisk maneuvers causing an undesirable delay in the operation, and affecting the system´s performance in terms both of productivity and of safety. In this case, input shaping can be used to generate shaped command profiles to transport the rods to the target position with minimum residual vibrations, however, due to the under-water maneuver the process becomes damped and input shaping becomes ineffective. Recently, a modified shaped command has been proposed based on the zero vibration (ZV) shaper, which effectively suppresses the rod´s residual vibrations in the presence of the hydrodynamic forces. In this paper, the said command is experimentally investigated with variations in its structure in order to get an insight into its capability of suppressing residual vibrations effectively.