Designing of the body shape of an autonomous underwater vehicle using the design of experiments method

摘要

The process of designing autonomous underwater vehicles comprises several steps, including the designing of the body shape. The hydrodynamic designing of the body shape is a major step in designing the body of an underwater vehicle. The effective parameters in the hydrodynamic design of body shape include the lengths of nose and tail, nose and tail profiles, and also the dimensions of the blunt sections in front of the nose and behind the tail. In the present study, the design of experiments method has been employed to investigate the effect of each of the above parameters on the drag coefficient of an autonomous underwater vehicle body. For this purpose, in addition to introducing the body classes of the Hydrolab family of underwater vehicles, the numerical simulation results of fluid flow over the body of a Hydrolab500 AUV have been used for the design of experiments. In the first step, an experiment has been performed in water tunnel on a test model in order to validate the pressure profile for the body of Hydrolab500. The comparison between the empirical and numerical results related to Hydrolab500 body confirms the validity of the numerical approach used in this paper. The results of the present work show that the drag coefficient of an autonomous submersible in the final design can be accurately estimated with the help of the presented method.