Thrust performance of propeller during underwater recovery process of AUV

Abstract

The thrust performance of propeller during underwater recovery process of Automatic Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is analyzed based on numerical simulations in this paper. In the AUV recovery process, AUV approaches a cone-shaped dock, and the thrust performance of propeller is influenced obviously by the gap flow between AUV and dock. The purpose of this paper is to exploit the thrust performance of propeller during the underwater recovery process of AUV To achieve this purpose, numerical simulations are performed based on the CFD method. The geometric model of AUV with propeller and dock is built firstly, and the computational domain is divided into two major parts, stationary domain and moving domain, which is based on the dynamic mesh technique to simulate AUV motion and propeller rotation. The hybrid mesh are generated to discretize the computational domain space, and the simulations are conducted based on the Finite Volume Method (FVM). The numerical results show that the thrust coefficient of propeller all increase when the AVU enters the dock, and the increase rate of propeller's thrust coefficient is larger when AVU moves at a uniform velocity.