Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics based design of hull and propeller of an underwater vehicle

Underwater Vehicles are now used widely for mining, marine research, and military surveillance etc. Design of the vehicle is of paramount importance as efficiency of the mechanical equipment is one of the important areas of research these days. A little increase in efficiency can help saving a large amount of fuel, and consequently, decreasing amount of money required to be spent and weight of vehicle. Design study of the vehicle may be carried out by performing a parametric study related to the hydrodynamics of the vehicle. Considering the geometric and kinematic characteristics of the blades and the hull, this study aims to figure out a configuration for greater hydrodynamic efficiency of the vehicle. Since real-time experimental equipment is expensive, we adopted a computational approach. For the present study, simulations for incompressible viscous flow over the underwater vehicle through a finite-volume method based industrial flow solver-ANSYS Fluent were employed. During the simulations, we swept over a parametric space consisting of hull shape, aspect ratio of the vehicle, and Reynold's number.