A Physics-Based Means of Computing the Flow Around a Maneuvering Underwater Vehicle

Abstract

A physics based method is developed that will lead to a means of accurately predicting the forces and moments acting on a maneuvering, self propelled, appended, underwater vehicle and the resulting vehicle motion. This methodology has been developed to replace the traditional correlation based means of predicting the maneuvering characteristics of a submerged vehicle. One primary difference exists between these methods. While the traditional methods use empirical correlations from model scale experiments to determine the hydrodynamic forces and moments acting on a vehicle during a maneuver, this new method numerically solves for the fluid dynamics using the three dimensional, time dependent Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes equations on time dependent curvilinear coordinates. Considering that large scale simulations of a maneuvering vehicle at high Reynolds number will require large amounts of floating point arithmetic and considerable storage capacity, high performance parallel computing is developed for making these types of large computations. While the baseline code used an algebraic turbulence model, the team also investigated the use of two equation turbulence models. The team coupled the fluid dynamics and vehicle dynamics together with a subroutine that solves for the vehicle dynamics at each time step using the six vector equations of Newton's laws of motion and seven additional kinematic relations. The research team performed a substantial number of steady and unsteady computations to validate various elements of the prediction method, improve confidence in the use of the method, and check the feasibility of using the six vector equations of Newton's laws of motion and seven additional kinematic relations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA322316

Entities

People

  • D. A. Boger
  • F. Davoudzadeh
  • H. Mcdonald
  • W. C. Zierke

Organizations

  • Pennsylvania State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundary Layer
  • Buoyancy
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Floating Point Operations
  • Flow Visualization
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Froude Number
  • Hydrodynamics
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Three Dimensional
  • Turbulent Mixing

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Marine Hydrodynamics