EFFECT OF TRANSVERSE, LONGITUDINAL AND VERTICAL SEPARATION ON DRAG FOR A FLEET OF AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER GLIDER

Land vehicle platooning has shown positive result in improving its fuel efficiency with decrease in drag. In this work, platooning of an autonomous underwater glider fleet is investigated. Specifically, the effect of transverse and longitudinal separation of the glider on the drag for a “V” formation is studied. An alternative 3D configuration for “V” formation which requires less foot print space is proposed. Besides that, the effect of transverse, longitudinal and vertical separation of glider for the 3D “V” formation on the drag will be studied. The number of glider in the fleet will be limited to five gliders. The project is a simulation study using ANSYS Fluent with Re-Normalization Group (RNG) k-epsilon model with non-equilibrium wall function as the turbulence model. Based on the simulation, the drag of the alternative 3D configuration is relatively similar to the drag of the drag of “V” formation. This shows that low drag can still be achieved with a more compact formation.