Passive Wake Vortex Control

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union and ending of the Cold War brought about many significant changes in military submarine operations. The enemies that the US Navy faces today and in the future will not likely be superpowers armed with nuclear submarines, but rather smaller, rogue nations employing cheaper diesel/electric submarines with advanced air-independent propulsion systems. Unlike Cold War submarine operations, which occurred in deep-water environments, future submarine conflicts are anticipated to occur in shallow, littoral regions that are complex and noisy. Consequently, non-acoustic signatures will become increasingly important and the submarine stealth technology designed for deep-water operations may not be effective in these environments. One such non-acoustic signature is the surface detection of a submarine's trailing vortex wake. If a submarine runs in a slightly buoyant condition, its diving planes must be inclined at a negative angle of attack to generate sufficient downforce, which keeps the submarine from rising to the surface. As a result, the diving planes produce a pair of counter-rotating trailing vortices that propagate to the water surface. In previous deep-water operations, this was not an issue since the submarines could dive deep enough so that the vortex pair became incoherent before it reached the watermore » surface. However, in shallow, littoral environments, submarines do not have the option of diving deep and, hence, the vortex pair can rise to the surface and leave a distinct signature that might be detectable by synthetic aperture radar. Such detection would jeopardize not only the mission of the submarine, but also the lives of military personnel on board. There has been another attempt to solve this problem and reduce the intensity of trailing vortices in the wakes of military submarines. The research of Quackenbush et al. over the past few years has been directed towards an idea called ''vortex leveraging.'' This active concept works by placing shape memory alloy (SMA) control surfaces on the submarine's diving planes and periodically oscillating them. The modulated control vortices generated by these surfaces interact with the tip vortices on the diving planes, causing an instability to rapidly occur. Though several numerical simulations have been presented, experimental verification does not appear to be available in the open literature. The authors address this problem through a concept called passive wake vortex control (PWVC), which has been demonstrated to rapidly break apart a trailing vortex wake and render it incoherent. PWVC functions by introducing unequal strength, counter-rotating control vortices next to the tip vortices. The presence of these control vortices destabilizes the vortex wake and produces a rapidly growing wake instability.« less