Design And Analysis Of Cold Forged AUV Propeller
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Date
2011-06
Authors
Abu Bakar, Muhamad Husaini
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Most of power of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is utilized by its propulsion system. Since AUV power only depends on onboard battery, the power consumption becomes crucial issue in optimizing the AUV performance. In this research a propeller need to be fabricated for AUV that will be developed by Underwater Robotic Research Group (URRG). The specific propeller design must be discovered in order to optimize the AUV power consumption. PVL code that has been developed by Kerwin (2001) was used as a tool to design the specific propeller. To analyse the behavior of the propeller, Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation was done on the propeller. This work also looked into propeller fabrication by using cold forging process. To forge the propeller, the geometry complexity was reduced by applying modular design concept. As a result, the PVL code gave high efficiency in the propeller design. The efficiency value was up to 76 %. By applying the modularization concept the propeller geometry was split up into three simple parts to ease the fabrication using cold forging process. However, only the blade was forged due to higher cost in fabricating the die set. The blade was successfully fabricated by using cold forging. The experimental result proved that the CFD simulation can predict the performance of the propeller. The different between simulation and experiment was only 5.41 %. Finally, the simulation result showed that the performance of the propeller was good enough to be used for the URRG AUV.
Description
Keywords
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle , depends on onboard battery