Optimal Design and Numerical Simulation on Fish-Like Flexible Hydrofoil Propeller

Hydrofoil is widely used in underwater vehicle for the excellent hydrodynamic characteristics. Currently, researches are mostly about the rigid hydrofoil while the flexible hydrofoil, like the caudal fin, has not been studied adequately. In this paper, the fish was regarded as the bionic object. Then the kinematics model to describe the fish swimming was put forward. A fin-peduncle propulsion mechanism was designed based on the kinematics model to achieve the similar sine curve swimming model. The propulsion mechanism was optimized by Matlab to reduce the deviation between the output curve of the fin-peduncle propulsion mechanism and the ideal motion trajectory. Moreover, the motion phase angles among flexible articulations are optimized to reduce fluid resistance and improve propulsive efficiency. Finally, the fish-like hydrofoil oscillation is simulated by fluid-solid coupling method based on the Fluent. It was shown that the optimized flexible fish-like oscillation could generate the motion that follows the similar law of sine. The propulsive efficiency of oscillating hydrofoil propeller is much higher than that of the screw propeller, and the flexible oscillation has higher propulsive efficiency than the rigid oscillation without obvious fluid resistance increase.