Hydrodynamic Modelling for a Transportation System of Two Unmanned Underwater Vehicles: Semi-Empirical, Numerical and Experimental Analyses

Underwater transportation is an essential approach for scientific exploration, maritime construction and military operations. Determining the hydrodynamic coefficients for a complex underwater transportation system comprising multiple vehicles is challenging. Here, the suitability of a quick and less costly semi-empirical approach to obtain the hydrodynamic coefficients for a complex transportation system comprising two Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) is investigated, where the interaction effects between UUVs are assumed to be negligible. The drag results were verified by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis at the steady state. The semi-empirical results agree with CFD in heave and sway; however, they were overpredicted in surge due to ignoring the wake effects. Furthermore, experiments were performed for the validation of the time-domain motion simulations with semi-empirical and CFD results. The simulations which were performed with the CFD drags were close to the experiments. The semi-empirical approach could be relied on once a correction parameter is included to account for the interactive effect between multiple UUVs. Overall, this work makes a contribution by deriving a semi-empirical approach for the dynamic and controlling system of dual UUVs, with CFD and experiments applied to ascertain its accuracy and potential improvement.

Automated summary

This study investigates the suitability of a semi-empirical approach for obtaining hydrodynamic coefficients of a complex underwater transportation system, and validates its accuracy through experiments and CFD analysis. Results show that the semi-empirical approach can be reliable when considering the interactive effects between multiple UUVs.