A Post-Swirl Maneuvering Propulsor Application to Undersea Vehicles

A method to generate vehicle maneuvering forces from a propulsor alone has been applied to a generic undersea vehicle. Open and ducted post-swirl propulsors were configured with an upstream rotor and downstream stator row. During normal operation, the downstream stator blades are all situated at the same pitch angle and generate a roll moment to counter the torque produced by the rotor. By varying the pitch angles of the stator blade about the circumference, it is possible to generate a mean stator side force that can be used to maneuver the vehicle. In addition, the side force can be increased with increasing thrust producing side forces at very low vehicle velocities enabling low-speed maneuvering capability. The viscous, 3-D Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) commercial code Fluent was used to predict the vehicle and propulsor component forces as well as the velocity field. Open and ducted geometric configurations were studied and force coefficients computed and compared with currently used control surface forces. Computations predicted that the maneuvering propulsor generated side forces equivalent to those produced by conventional control surfaces with side force coefficients on the order of 0.25 for the open propulsor at the self-propulsion point. This translates to 50% larger forces than can be generated by conventional control surfaces on 21" unmanned undersea vehicles. The ducted configuration produces maximum side force coefficients on the order of 0.15, which is still sufficient for vehicle control. Both configurations produced side forces for the Bollard pull condition indicating low-speed maneuvering capability.