Abstract
Sail is the core part of autonomous sailboat and wing sail is a new type of sail. Wing sail generates not only propulsion but also lateral force and heeling moment. The latter two will affect the navigation status and bring resistance. Double sail can effectively reduce the center of wind pressure and heeling moment. In order to study the effect of distance between two sails, airfoil and attack angle on the total lift coefficient of double sail propulsion system, pressure coefficient distribution and lift coefficient calculation model have been established based on vortex panel method. By using the basic finite solution, the fluid dynamic forces on the two-dimensional sails are computed. The results show that, the distance in the range of 0 to 1 time chord length, when using the same airfoil in the fore and aft sail, the total lift coefficient of the double sail increases with the increase of distance, finally reaches a stable value in the range of one to three times chord length. Lift coefficients of thicker airfoils are more sensitive to the change of distance. The thicker the airfoil, the longer distance is required of the total lift coefficient toward stable. When different airfoils are adopted in fore and aft sail, the total lift coefficient increases with the increase of the thickness of aft sail. The smaller the thickness difference is, the more sensitive to the distance change the lift coefficient is. The thinner the fore sail is, the lower the influence will be on the lift coefficient of aft sail.
Highlights
Autonomous sailboat is a new kind of marine mobile observation platform at the air-sea interface, which uses wind power as driving force
Compared with conventional soft sail, rigid wing sail is widely used in autonomous sailboats because of its large lift−drag ratio, large lift coefficient, good shape stability and simple aerodynamics and it is easy to automatic control
By satisfying no penetration condition and Kutta condition, a linear algebraic equation with unknown strength can be solved, with which, the lift coefficients and pressure distribution can be predicted. In addition to this introduction, the rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the numerical method for calculating aerodynamic characteristics of double sail based on vortex panel method
Summary
Autonomous sailboat is a new kind of marine mobile observation platform at the air-sea interface, which uses wind power as driving force. Panel method can be used to calculate the pressure distribution, lift and moment characteristics of airfoil flow with arbitrary shape, thickness and attack angle. By satisfying no penetration condition and Kutta condition, a linear algebraic equation with unknown strength can be solved, with which, the lift coefficients and pressure distribution can be predicted In addition to this introduction, the rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the numerical method for calculating aerodynamic characteristics of double sail based on vortex panel method.
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