engleski

Hydrodynamic performance of an autonomous underwater vehicle with a swivel tail

The paper first describes a design of modular autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with propulsion system where a propeller is mounted at the end of a conical swivel tail. The AUV is capable to operate autonomously as a glider (silent mode) and is able to drive relatively fast, if required by the mission objectives. The swivel tail design required an preliminary analysis of a hydrodynamic performance of the AUV. Numerical simulations for the hydrodynamic analysis of different states of operational modes were carried out with the source-doublet panel method for incompressible potential flow. The panel method coupled with time-marching free-wake technique was used for prediction of unsteady hydrodynamics and wake dynamics of the hull-propeller system for various tail positions, i.e. angles. The steering of the AUV in horizontal plane was simulated, and the hydrodynamic performance and limitations were analyzed.

AUV; autonomous vehicle; hydrodynamics; CFD

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