The effects of the circulating water tunnel wall and support struts on hydrodynamic coefficients estimation for autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of the Circulating Water Channel (CWC) side wall and support struts on the hydrodynamic coefficient prediction for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) experiments. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method has been used to model the CWC tests. The hydrodynamic coefficients estimated by CFD are compared with the prediction of experiments to verify the accuracy of simulations. In order to study the effect of side wall on the hydrodynamic characteristics of the AUV in full scale captive model tests, this paper uses the CWC non-dimensional width parameters to quantify the correlation between the CWC width and hydrodynamic coefficients of the chosen model. The result shows that the hydrodynamic coefficients tend to be constant with the CWC width parameters increasing. Moreover, the side wall has a greater effect than the struts.