Underwater glider is becoming an increasingly important tool for exploring the ocean. As the underwater tasks become more challenging, it puts forward higher requirements for the endurance of electric underwater gliders. This paper proposes an operation principle for the underwater glider jointly driven by the ocean thermal energy and the electrical energy, which has the advantages of both electric underwater glider and thermal underwater glider. Based on the proposed operation principle, a universal energy consumption model and sailing range equation suitable for the electric, thermal and hybrid propulsion underwater gliders are established. Taking the sailing range, sailing range difference and sailing range ratio as the evaluation indexes, the effects of configuration parameters and navigation parameters on the endurance of three underwater gliders are analyzed. The results show that the endurance and endurance advantage of hybrid propulsion underwater glider can be improved with greater volume change rate of phase change material (PCM), heavier energy carrier and smaller average power of the task sensor, and its high performance can also be maintained with a weight ratio of PCM close to the critical value. Meanwhile, it is beneficial to obtaining stronger endurance for the hybrid propulsion glider during its operation by setting larger diving depth as well as smaller gliding angle and volume change of oil within the design range. Finally, the hybrid propulsion prototype and Petrel-II electric underwater glider are deployed to carry out the comparative sea trial, which verifies the correctness of sailing range equation and the availability of prototype. The results show that the hybrid propulsion underwater glider has a better energy consumption economy than the electric underwater glider.

水下滑翔机正成为探索海洋的越来越重要的工具。随着水下任务越来越具有挑战性，对电动水下滑翔机的续航能力提出了更高的要求。本文提出了一种海洋热能和电能联合驱动的水下滑翔机的工作原理，它兼有电动水下滑翔机和热力水下滑翔机的优点。基于提出的工作原理，建立了适用于电、热和混合推进水下滑翔机的通用能耗模型和航程方程。以航程、航程差和航程比为评价指标，分析了配置参数和导航参数对三种水下滑翔机续航能力的影响。结果表明，混合推进水下滑翔机的续航和续航优势可以通过更大的相变材料（PCM）体积变化率、更重的能量载体和更小的任务传感器平均功率来提高，并且其高性能也可以保持PCM 的重量比接近临界值。同时，在设计范围内设置较大的下潜深度、较小的滑翔角和油量变化，有利于混合动力滑翔机在运行过程中获得更强的续航能力。最后，部署混合推进原型机和海燕-II型电动水下滑翔机进行对比海试，验证了航程方程的正确性和样机的可用性。结果表明，混合动力水下滑翔机比电动水下滑翔机具有更好的能耗经济性。