Calculation of Time-Independent Maneuvering Coefficients of an Underwater Vehicle Based on Single Grid Structure

A simulation approach relying on a single grid topology has been employed to replicate the motion characteristics of different experimental facilities, including towing tank, rotating arm mechanism, and planar motion mechanism using a single mesh. The control volume and computational mesh setup was built in a way to enable to perform both steady and time dependent simulations to compute entire set of coefficients required by the standard submarine equations of motion. Mesh is consisted of a rectangular prism shaped background and a spherical overset domain which can be rotated, circulated and oscillated depending on the simulation type. To enable the implementation of this approach to the rotating arm simulations, modifications to source code of the open-source computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM have been made. Motivation is to change the perspective on the problem by using the knowledge of mathematics behind the solution algorithms and the software structure. In this study extensive set of time-independent coefficients obtained via straight and oblique towing as well as steady rotation simulations are presented for a fully appended generic submarine geometry. Results are then compared with the benchmark experimental data. It is found that the consistency between results are quite satisfactory.