As a new kind of autonomous underwater vehicle, bionic submersible has many merits such as high
efficiency and low costs. In order to obtain such advantages, it is a good way to simulate the shapes of marine
animals and apply them to the design of artificial underwater vehicle. In this paper, an optimization system
of airfoils is proposed by the improved class-shape-transformation (CST) parameterization method and genetic
algorithm (GA). The appearance of a manta-ray-inspired underwater vehicle is rebuilt using the optimal sectional
airfoils obtained by the proposed optimization system. Computational simulations are carried out to investigate
the hydrodynamic performance of the submersible using the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
code Fluent. The results demonstrate that the maximum thickness of the vehicle increases by 9%, which means
the loading capacity is increased. Moreover, the underwater vehicle shows better hydrodynamic performance,
and the lift-drag ratio of initial design is increased by more than 10% using the presented optimization system of
airfoils.
LUO Yang (罗扬), PAN Guang* (潘光), HUANG Qiaogao (黄桥高), SHI Yao (施瑶), LAI Hui (赖慧)
. Parametric Geometric Model and Shape Optimization of Airfoils of a Biomimetic Manta Ray Underwater Vehicle[J]. Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University(Science), 2019
, 24(3)
: 402
-408
.
DOI: 10.1007/s12204-019-2076-4
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