Hydrodynamic Coefficients for an Extraterrestrial Submarine

An autonomous submarine design was proposed as part of NASA’s NIAC program to explore the hydrocarbon seas of Titan, the Saturnian moon, and study its hydrological cycle. The submarine is to be capable of operating at both the surface and in a deeply-submerged mode. This study aims to complement and compare previous CFD simulations with results obtained using the panel code CMARC. The comparison is of interest as the previous studies included a grid-based viscous code and a particle method using smoothed-particle hydrodynamics. The previous approaches encountered difficulties in obtaining agreeable results as each method has flow regimes suitable for a specific formulation, specifically free-surface flow versus a deeply submerged case. The panel formulation presented here is for the deeply submerged configuration and results match well with other approaches and parametric analyses, particularly when appendages are included in the modeling.