Prediction of the hydrodynamic coefficients of an autonomous underwater vehicle

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are attractive platforms for many applications in the off-shore industry. The design and development of an AUV is an expensive and complex task. During the development of these vehicles both at the stage of physical design for construction, as in the stage of the navigation system design, it is critical to estimate and analyze the dynamic behavior of these vehicles in order to reduce design changes over the prototype, which it entails time and cost overruns. This work aims to determine the mathematical model of the AUV-ICTIOBOT, which is an underwater vehicle developed by the research group INTELYMEC of Engineering Faculty of the UNCPBA of Argentina. To propose an AUV model we use computational modeling using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The obtained model constitutes the foundational bases to adjust the physical design and to design the navigation and control module of the ICTIOBOT, and also to analyze the performance of the vehicle in the ocean depths.