Investigation and optimization of appendage influence on the hydrodynamic performance of AUVs

Abstract

Navigational range is an important attribute of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and drag reduction efforts have been pursued to improve overall efficiency. Improved efficiency results in a more capable vehicle over all. Historically, the majority of research focused on drag reduction has been concentrated on the optimization of vehicle hull geometry. The influence of the hull appendages on drag, however, has been largely ignored owing to their smaller size. In this study, the impacts of appendage size and position on vehicle drag are investigated using a computational fluid dynamics method. The results indicate that appendages increase more drag because of their impact on the development of turbulence. The investigation of the interactions between multiple appendages fixed on a vehicle hull shows that optimization is necessary for drag reduction. This paper presents an arrangement optimization method for AUV appendages based on the Kriging approximation model and the multi-island genetic algorithm. The results of the optimization show that appendage influence on hydrodynamic performance is directly proportional to its size, and that a distributed arrangement is beneficial for drag reduction.

A Calibration Method of USBL Installation Error Based on Attitude Determination

“…I. INTRODUCTION utonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) is an indispensable carrier for human to investigate and study marine resources [1][2]. Underwater positioning technology is one of the key technologies for underwater vehicles to carry out underwater operations [3][4][5].…”

A numerical investigation about the effects of Reynolds number on the flow around an appended axisymmetric body of revolution

“…Numerous computational studies on the towed DSub configuration are available in the literature, where usually the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are solved due to cost considerations (Gorski, Coleman & Haussling 1990;Givler et al 1991;Boger & Dreyer 2006;Toxopeus 2008;Pan, Zhang & Zhou 2012;Budak & Beji 2016;Cao, Zhu & Zeng 2016;Manshadi, Hejranfar & Farajollahi 2017;Gao et al 2018;Wang et al 2018;Zhang, Chao & Pan 2019), with some works dealing also with the free-surface effects (Shariati & Mousavizadegan 2017;Amiri et al 2018). More recently, hybrid formulations such as the detached eddy simulation (DES) approach are gradually replacing RANS in the design cycle.…”