Computer Support in the Design and Testing of Undersea Towed Systems

Abstract

Since 1965 the authors' company has developed, assembled, and applied a computer simulation to the problem of analyzing the static and dynamic behavior of underwater towed systems. As a result of a recent survey [16]3 of towed system dynamic analysis literature, it became apparent that other investigators in the field of towed system analysis were either completely unaware of this work or had only a very superficial knowledge of it. It is a purpose of this paper to describe the modeling approach taken for the towed system and to present the methods used to derive the equations of motion for the model. Assumptions that were made in order to achieve practical solutions to the equations of motion also are discussed. A high degree of correlation with actual towing trials has been achieved by this analysis and it has been demonstrated that practical engineering problems can be solved using such a simulation tool. The computer support provided in 1970 to underway sea trials of a hydrofoil towed system is presented and discussed. It is believed that this simulation represents the current state of the art in towed system simulation.