CFD analysis of a round shaped air cushion vehicle with flexible skirt segments at 90° and different air clearance height

Abstract

At present time, the most used flexible skirt in construction of air cushion vehicles is the segmented one. Therefore, this study focuses on performing CFD analysis specific to the area of the segments of such a skirt. The proposed construction model has the outer diameter of flexible skirt segments of 1 meter, the segment thickness of 2 mm and the feed hole of 50 mm. A particular feature of proposed model is the circular ring shape of feed hole. Considering that segments height and air clearance height directly influence the performance of the air cushion, these two parameters were varied. Values ranged between 50 to 200 mm for flexible skirt segment height and from 10 to 50 mm for air clearance height. CFD analyses were performed in ANSYS Fluent program to determine velocity contours, pressure contours and streamlines. The main purpose of simulation was to determine lift force for all analysed configurations. The lift force variation was subsequently plotted according to air clearance height values through MATLAB program. Using Curve Fitting Toolbox application, it was concluded that the power type function with two terms best characterizes the analysed curves.