ABSTRACT

Nature offers unlimited potential in addition to being a home for people for millions of years, and people have developed a wide variety of technologies for themselves using the potential that the nature has bestowed. In this study, the resistance characteristics of a submarine form which inspired by nature, were investigated by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach for various velocity conditions. Firstly, CFD analysis of benchmark DARPA Suboff Submarine are carried out for different velocity conditions. In the computational analysis, the turbulent flow around the submarine is modeled with Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model with k-Ɛ turbulence model to solve the governing equations. The validation of the CFD approaches applied was provided by comparing the numerical results with the experimental results obtained from the literature, and verified by performing an uncertainty analysis based on the grid density in the computational domain. Then, a submarine hull form with the same length and average width that of the DARPA Submarine is generated by using the geometry of the shark form as source of inspiration. Resistance values of the nature inspired submarine are predicted by using the DARPA Submarine CFD approach and the results are compared with the results of the DARPA Submarine for the same hydrodynamic conditions. For the same length and average width; the resistance of the shark inspired submarine is achieved slightly higher than that of the DARPA Submarine. This study is expected to be an example for the study of new submarines that will be developed inspired by nature, especially by the forms of various marine animals.