Computational resistance analyses of a generic submarine hull form and its geometric variants

This study investigates resistance characteristics of a DARPA-SUBOFF submarine bare hull form and its geometric variants using a commercial code ANSYS-FLUENT. First, benchmark tests were carried out by comparing the available experimental data with RANS computations performed by selecting shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model for computations. These tests provided the means of setting optimum computational parameters for the turbulence model. Then, using the generic DARPA-SUBOFF bare hull as the basis, three slightly different bow and three stern forms were generated. These new bow and stern patterns were combined with each other so that a total of nine new submarine forms were created. Finally, keeping the tuned parameters the same, numerical resistance calculations of the newly created submarine forms were carried out. The results show that one of the form variants has the lowest resistance among others and that it is possible to use the proposed approach to obtain a hull form with minimum resistance by generating a family of forms from a generic model.