TITLE:
Resistance and Seakeeping Investigation for Optimization of the Floating Hull of Wave Glider
AUTHORS:
Alaaeldeen M. E. Ahmed, Wenyang Duan
KEYWORDS:
Wave Glider, Calm Water Resistance, Seakeeping, CFD, Maxsurf
JOURNAL NAME:
World Journal of Engineering and Technology,
Vol.4 No.3D,
October
29,
2016
ABSTRACT: Wave glider is the first unmanned autonomous marine robot to use only the ocean’s endless supply of wave energy for propulsion. Wave glider comprises fin system, tether and float which harvest all of its energy from waves and sun to produce forward thrust. As a consequence of the lack of design information and data for the wave glider, the main aim of the study is using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to present a method to predict calm water resistance for the floating hull through calculations of 3 different hull forms using the same mesh generation under the same conditions. Calculations are carried out using 3 different mesh sizes for Froude number in the range of 0.10 to 0.40 and compared for accuracy of the solution parameters. Wigley parabolic hull, high speed round bilge form (NPL) and Series 60 have been comparatively investigated in order to estimate the hydrodynamics performance of the hull. The linear seakeeping analysis, coupled heave and pitch motions, roll motion, in irregular waves, with one parameter Bretschneider and JONSWAP spectra. Numerical computations have been performed for motion response predictions of the three hulls which cover wave angles from 0? to 180? at 45? intervals for six different forward speeds from 0 to 4.304 knots using Maxsurf Motion software. The close agreement between the numerical predictions shows the importance of CFD applications in estimating the hydrodynamics performance to design the floating hull and the numerical method is useful in glider design. The fine grid is fit to the calculation and shows the most appropriate results because convergent results are obtained as the mesh size decrease so the fine grid is the one which will be applied for the other hulls. Also it can be observed that the added resistance and the RAOs for NPL hull are less than the other hulls. Therefore from the comparisons, the NPL hull is the optimum hull compared to the other hulls from the resistance and seakeeping point of view.