Wayne Neu

Ocean Engineering

Design and Construction of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

We have carried out the design, construction and testing of several autonomous underwater vehicles including a very small, high-speed (15 knots) vehicle, a high endurance self-mooring vehicle, and several general purpose vehicles. My emphasis has been on the hydrodynamic design, propulsion, and general mechanical aspects of these vehicles. We have specialized in producing working vehicles for special and unique applications. Both single propeller and counter-rotating propeller (for torque control) designs have produced ranging in size from 8 lbs. to over 100 lbs.

Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics of Marine Vehicles

We currently have expertise in the computation of unsteady flow problems both with and without a free surface. Projects have included simulation of the dynamics of monohull ships, surface-effect ships, including the dynamics of their air cushion, and underwater vehicles. The surface effect ship work produced the first high-fidelity representation of the free surface response under the craft at forward speeds in both calm water and in waves. The underwater vehicle work is aimed at simulating the fully-nonlinear dynamic response of the vehicle to inputs from a proposed control system as it “flies” through the water in six degrees of freedom. This effort has applicability to both the autonomous underwater vehicle research as well as to the dynamics of large manned underwater vehicles. Our emphasis is on pushing existing codes to teach us something about interesting hydrodynamics problems rather than on code development.