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For amphibious vehicles that are utilized in military services, high-speed ship-to-shore movement is an important requirement for enhancement of the operational capability in tactical environments. At high speeds, such a vehicle begins to sink at the stern, causing the bow to rise out of the water. Moreover, excessive trim has a deleterious effect on forward field of vision and powering performance. In this study, a hydrofoil was considered as a trim-control device to decrease the significant bow rise without compromising the performance. Experiments were conducted in a towing tank to investigate the running attitude and powering performance of a box-shaped amphibious vehicle at high speeds. Results for the hydrodynamic features show that a fixed hydrofoil under the stern of the vehicle successfully achieved an improved trim. It was also found that the interaction between the waterjet and hydrofoil can enhance the dynamic lift of the hydrofoil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normally, tip vortex cavitation (TVC) is first observed at a certain location behind the tips of propeller blades. Therefore, TVC is important for naval ships and research vessels that require raising the cavitation inception speed to maximum possible values. The concepts for alleviating the tip vortex are summarized by Platzer and Souders (1979), who carried out a thorough literature survey. Active control of TVC involves the injection of a polymer or water from the blade tip. The main effect of such mass injection (both water and polymer solutions) into the vortex core is an increase in the core radius, consequently delaying TVC inception. However, the location of the injection port needs to be selected with great care to ensure that the mass injection is effective in delaying TVC inception. In the present study, we propose a semiactive control scheme that is achieved by attaching a thread at the propeller tip. The main idea of a semiactive control is that because of its flexibility, the attached thread can be sucked into the low-pressure region closer to the vortex core center. An experimental study using a scale model was carried out in the cavitation tunnel at the Seoul National University. It was found that a flexible thread can effectively suppress the occurrence of TVC under the design condition for a model propeller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vorticity-velocity formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations allows purely kinematical problems to be decoupled from the pressure term, since the pressure is eliminated by applying the curl operator. The Vortex-In-Cell (VIC) method, which is based on the vorticity-velocity formulation, offers particle-mesh algorithms to numerically simulate flows past a solid body. The penalization method is used to enforce boundary conditions at a body surface with a decoupling between body boundaries and computational grids. Its main advantage is a highly efficient implementation for solid boundaries of arbitrary complexity on Cartesian grids. We present an efficient algorithm to numerically implement the vorticity-velocity-pressure formulation including a penalty term to simulate the pressure fields around a solid body. In vorticity-based methods, pressure field can be independently computed from the solution procedure for vorticity. This clearly simplifies the implementation and reduces the computational cost. Obtaining the pressure field at any fixed time represents the most challenging goal of this study. We validate the implementation by numerical simulations of an incompressible viscous flow around an impulsively started circular cylinder in a wide range of Reynolds numbers: Re = 40, 550, 3000, and 9500. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We optimize the interpolation of a piecewise G1 biarc curve through a given sequence of points by means of an internal energy minimization model. A combination of bending and stretching energy, which we call internal energy, provides global control over the shape of the curve. Starting from an initial guess, we solve the minimization model using a quasi-Newton algorithm. The input data can include or exclude end tangents, or it may form a closed shape. Experiments indicate the effect of internal energy on the interpolation and demonstrate that the resulting curves are smooth and free of extraneous loops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  We refine the geometry of a propeller by modifying the blade sections to align them with surface streamlines, obtained by the panel method. Redefinition of the blade sections aligned with the streamlines is provided together with surface modeling scheme by which model propellers were built. Numerical simulations and open-water tests on models suggest a possible increase of 1% in propeller efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]