Europa Explorer: Development of a Hydrodynamic Casing for the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Zusammenfassung (Abstract) :

The poster gives a compact summary about the ”biological inspired“ shape design and shape optimization of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) from the project Europa-Explorer. An adequate shape design for the AUV minimizes the drag and elongates the mission time using active propulsion. In addition to that it supports as well the passive gliding. The main question was how to describe an assumed adequate biological shape from fishes or marine mammals technically and with which method this shape can be further optimized in a natural way with technical boundary conditions. The NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics)-Profile description offers a good possibility to describe the shape of a tuna technically, this built the basis for the template of the tuna shape design. In addition this ”tuna“ shape forms the start geometry for the stern section shape optimization via an evolution strategy. The shape optimization is based on an evolutionary optimization algorithm coupled with numerical fluid dynamics. With this shape optimization method the drag could be reduced by 28,8The result shows that the chosen shape and the optimization method are, in the present case, convenient to improve the hydrodynamic properties of the AUV.