Title:
An integrated approach to the design of supercavitating underwater vehicles

dc.contributor.advisor Ruzzene, Massimo
dc.contributor.author Ahn, Seong Sik en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember Bottasso, Carlo L.
dc.contributor.committeeMember Costello, Mark
dc.contributor.committeeMember Hodges, Dewey H.
dc.contributor.committeeMember Weston, Neil R.
dc.contributor.department Aerospace Engineering en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2007-08-16T17:54:34Z
dc.date.available 2007-08-16T17:54:34Z
dc.date.issued 2007-05-09 en_US
dc.description.abstract A supercavitating vehicle, a next-generation underwater vehicle capable of changing the paradigm of modern marine warfare, exploits supercavitation as a means to reduce drag and achieve extremely high submerged speeds. In supercavitating flows, a low-density gaseous cavity entirely envelops the vehicle and as a result the vehicle is in contact with liquid water only at its nose and partially over the afterbody. Hence, the vehicle experiences a substantially reduced skin drag and can achieve much higher speed than conventional vehicles. The development of a controllable and maneuvering supercavitating vehicle has been confronted with various challenging problems such as the potential instability of the vehicle, the unsteady nature of cavity dynamics, the complex and non-linear nature of the interaction between vehicle and cavity. Furthermore, major questions still need to be resolved regarding the basic configuration of the vehicle itself, including its control surfaces, the control system, and the cavity dynamics. In order to answer these fundamental questions, together with many similar ones, this dissertation develops an integrated simulation-based design tool to optimize the vehicle configuration subjected to operational design requirements, while predicting the complex coupled behavior of the vehicle for each design configuration. Particularly, this research attempts to include maneuvering flight as well as various operating trim conditions directly in the vehicle configurational optimization. This integrated approach provides significant improvement in performance in the preliminary design phase and indicates that trade-offs between various performance indexes are required due to their conflicting requirements. This dissertation also investigates trim conditions and dynamic characteristics of supercavitating vehicles through a full 6 DOF model. The influence of operating conditions, and cavity models and their memory effects on trim is analyzed and discussed. Unique characteristics are identified, e.g. the cavity memory effects introduce a favorable stabilizing effect by providing restoring fins and planing forces. Furthermore, this research investigates the flight envelope of a supercavitating vehicle, which is significantly different from that of a conventional vehicle due to different hydrodynamic coefficients as well as unique operational conditions. en_US
dc.description.degree Ph.D. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/16237
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology en_US
dc.subject Supercavitating underwater vehicles en_US
dc.subject Configurational optimization en_US
dc.subject Trim analysis en_US
dc.subject Dynamic simulation en_US
dc.subject Trajectory optimization of maneuvering vehicles en_US
dc.subject Flight dynamics en_US
dc.subject Underwater vehicle design en_US
dc.subject.lcsh Submersibles Design and construction en_US
dc.subject.lcsh Trajectory optimization en_US
dc.subject.lcsh Cavitation en_US
dc.subject.lcsh Computer simulation en_US
dc.title An integrated approach to the design of supercavitating underwater vehicles en_US
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.corporatename College of Engineering
local.contributor.corporatename Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
local.relation.ispartofseries Doctor of Philosophy with a Major in Aerospace Engineering
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 7c022d60-21d5-497c-b552-95e489a06569
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication a348b767-ea7e-4789-af1f-1f1d5925fb65
relation.isSeriesOfPublication f6a932db-1cde-43b5-bcab-bf573da55ed6
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