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CFD Study of an Autonomous Submarine in Extraterrestrial Seas

Conference Paper · August 2017

DOI: 10.1115/DETC2017-67593

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 Proceedings of the ASME 2017 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences &
Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
IDETC2017
August 6-9, 2017, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

DRAFT DETC2017-67593

CFD STUDY OF AN AUTONOMOUS SUBMARINE IN EXTRATERRESTRIAL SEAS

S. Carberry Mogan1, P. Sawicki1, C. J. Bernardo1, D. Chen1, I. Sahin1, J. Hartwig2, A. Tafuni1
1
New York University, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, Brooklyn, 11201 NY
2
NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, 44135 OH

ABSTRACT Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I in

A computational study is conducted to evaluate
the performance of an extraterrestrial submarine to
operate in the seas of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. To
simulate the flow around the submarine and offer a
prediction for the power requirements, Computational
Fluid Dynamics tools of ANSYS© FLUENT© and
DualSPHysics are utilized for the deeply submerged
and near-surface conditions, respectively. Several
operational scenarios are investigated and
comparisons are made with other available results
with a good qualitative and quantitative agreement.
INTRODUCTION
Discoveries made in past and present NASA
missions have shown that Saturn’s largest moon,
Titan, is the only planetary object in our solar system,
other than Earth, that has a dense atmosphere and
clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid. Data
from the Cassini-Huygens mission indicates that the
Titan polar environment sustains stable seas of
variable concentrations of ethane, methane, and
nitrogen, with a surface temperature around 93 K [1].
Since the finding of liquid hydrocarbon seas on
Titan’s surface, NASA has supported research
towards developing the capabilities of conducting in-
situ science within these liquid bodies. A conceptual
design of an autonomous submarine (Figure 1) to
navigate Titan’s cryogenic seas was a funded NASA’s
2014 [2]. Concepts of vehicles capable of landing in
these cryogenic seas have been explored in the past as
part of a NASA–ESA Flagship mission, Titan Saturn
System Mission (TSSM), a NASA Discovery
solicitation study, Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) [3].
The Huygens probe from the Cassini-Huygens
mission was also designed with the ability to float in
the event that the landing was to happen in a liquid
rather than on land, a possibility still unknown during
the design of the probe [4, 5]. The advantage of
conducting science with a submarine versus the other
aforementioned vehicles from previous studies is that
the former would be capable of submerging to various
depths whereas the latter would only able to float on
the surface. Conducting submerged science has the
potential for a broader range of results from the
mission, such as mapping using side looking sonar,
imaging and spectroscopy of the sea at all depths, as
well as sampling of the sea bottom and shallow
shoreline [2].
One way to study the interactions between the
submarine and its surroundings, aside from the costly
construction of the actual vehicle and measuring these
interactions first-hand, would be to simulate
submarine operations using numerical techniques.
Since multiple bodies of liquid were found on the
surface of Titan, Computational Fluid Dynamics
(CFD) software is indeed a viable option to analyze

1 Copyright © 2017 by ASME

the flow generated by the vehicle as it traverses seas
with properties that change with depth and location.
Data from Cassini can also assist in finding out
properties of the seas at various depths, so not only
can the location of the model be dynamic but the depth
at which the submarine operates and its properties can
be quantified and simulated correctly. Simulation
results can then be used to assess which body of liquid
is more suitable to conduct in-situ science. They will
also indicate which range of depths is ideal for
specific operations.
Figure 1. External components of the Titan submarine [2].
Past cryogenics CFD research usually relates to
simulating and quantifying “sloshing” of cryogenic
liquid enclosed in the tanks of space launchers to
predict the temperature and pressure evolution [6]. To
the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has never
been an attempt to simulate hydrodynamic
interactions between a cryogenic liquid and a vehicle.
Research on CFD analyses of submarines typically
includes steady and unsteady Reynolds–Averaged
Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations [7]. Therein, a
mesh is generated to simulate heaving, swaying and
pitching and to extract the resultant hydrodynamic
forces and moments acting on the submarine. In this
research, knowledge of cryogenic liquid dynamics
and submarine hydrodynamics is used to implement
CFD simulations with the goal of assisting the design
of an autonomous submarine capable of traversing
and conducting in-situ science in the cryogenic, liquid
hydrocarbon seas on the surface of Titan. Results
from this work will be provided as feedback to list
design modifications, navigation techniques and ideal
locations and depths to conduct science in order to
increase the efficiency of the overall mission.
METHODOLOGY
The numerical study of the flow field around the
Phase 1 design of the Titan submarine includes
several operating conditions, among which fully
submerged and surfaced configurations. Therefore,
appropriate CFD techniques are chosen to model each
type of flow adequately.
Deeply Submerged Case
In the case of fully submerged operations, the
absence of the free-surface facilitates the use of grid-
based commercial software, such as ANSYS©
FLUENT© [8]. A parasolid model of the submarine
geometry is imported to ANSYS© and a second
domain of fluid encompassing the submarine is
created. The submarine model is then subtracted from
the enclosure, leaving the fluid with the shell of a
submarine inside. The mesh of the fluid domain is
obtained utilizing the ANSYS© native mesh module.
Simulations of 90,000 elements (coarse resolution) to
12,000,000 elements (high resolution) are performed
and fluid flow and pressure forces on the
hydrodynamic skin are presented in the next section.
For rapid computational implementation within the
framework of FLUENT©, and to increase the mesh at
areas of interest, such as the antenna array, a solution-
based adaptive mesh is used to further refine the mesh
when and where needed. Convergence is then
determined twice: once to determine the validity of a
simulation using one mesh, and again while varying
mesh sizes to ensure mesh independence of the
overall study.
A finite volume method with a standard k  
turbulence model and standard wall treatment
function is chosen. The semi-implicit method for
pressure-linked equations (SIMPLE) scheme and
second–order upwind scheme are used to solve the
RANS equations in Cartesian tensor form:
 
 (  ui )  0 (1)
t xi
2 Copyright © 2017 by ASME
  p
(  ui )  (  ui u j )   
t x j xi
(2)
   u u j 2 u   
   i    ij l    (  uiuj )
x j   j x xi 3 xl   x j
where, ui  ui  ui , ui and ui are the mean and
fluctuating velocity components ( i  1, 2,3 ),
respectively,  is the fluid density,  is the fluid
dynamic viscosity, p is pressure, t is time, and  ij is
the Kronecker delta. The stress tensor is estimated
using the standard k   mode.
Boundary conditions at the domain edges include
a 1 m/s velocity in the +x direction at the inlet and null
gage pressure at the outlet. Moreover, a no-slip
condition is applied to all faces of the submarine and
a free slip wall condition is applied to the four
remaining outer faces.
A study on different components of interest, such
as the mast and hydrodynamic skin (see Figure 2) is
also performed and the results are validated against
analytical results obtained in the Phase 1 NIAC report
[2]. Similarly to the geometry on the full submarine,
a fluid domain is defined as the enclosure around the
component. As these components are simpler in
geometry, sizing is not necessary to generate a high
quality mesh. In each component study, the inlet is
defined as a 1 m/s velocity boundary condition and
the outlet is a 0 gage pressure boundary condition. On
each of the four other bounding walls, a moving-wall
boundary condition is applied.
Figure 2. One of the ANSYS-generated grids for the
hydrodynamic skin.
Figure 3. Grid convergence for the hydrodynamic skin.
Mesh independence is achieved by iterating on the
design as a function of number of mesh elements.
From a very coarse mesh with ~105 elements to a finer
mesh with ~107 elements, the total force on the
submarine is calculated, as seen in Figure 3.
Surfaced Case
The simulation of the flow generated by the
submarine in the vicinity of the free-surface or above
the waterline is carried out using Smoothed Particle
Hydrodynamic (SPH), a purely Lagrangian method
well-established in the literature for use in
hydrodynamics problem [9  12]. The computational
domain is regarded as a set of moving particles, each
having individual material properties and complying
with the continuity and momentum equations, written
in SPH notation as follows:
Dk N
  ml u k ,l  kWk ,l (3)
Dt l 1
Du k N
 p p 
  ml  l2  k2  Tk ,l   kWk ,l  g (4)
Dt l 1  l k 
where u k ,l  u k  u l , uk and ul represent the velocity
vector of two random particles in the spatial domain,
N is the total number of particles within the support
domain of particle k, ml and ρl are the mass and
density of the interpolating particle l, Tk ,l represents
the viscous stresses, and Wk,l = W(xk −xl ,h) is a
smoothing function that defines the interpolation
domain around each SPH particle.
3 Copyright © 2017 by ASME
 SPH simulation are carried out using the open
source code DualSPHysics v4.0 [13]. Instead of
focusing on a purely incompressible problem,
DualSPHysics utilizes the assumption of a small
artificial compressibility for the fluid under
investigation, relating the pressure and the density via
an equation of state given by:

    
p  B     1 (5)
  0  
 

where typically   7 ,  0 is the fluid reference Figure 4. Velocity contours in deeply submerged conditions
at 1 m/s cruising velocity.
density and B is a coefficient that controls the relative
density fluctuations. The value of B is chosen by
scaling the density fluctuations with the square of the
Mach number of the flow and imposing a proper value
of the particles’ speed of sound to obtain reasonable
computational time, see [14] for more details. The
fluid properties chosen in this preliminary study are
those of liquid ethane as in [2], with a reference
density of 660 Kg/m3 and a kinematic viscosity of
6.03 106 m2/s. The gravitational acceleration vector
g  (0i, 0j, -1.352k) is used based on data for Titan
available in the literature. The initial particle spacing
is set to 1/160th of the submarine length overall, L.
This value represents a good compromise between
accurate solutions and reasonable computational time. Figure 5. Pressure contours in deeply submerged conditions
The fluid domain has dimensions of 7L ×3.5L×2/3L, at 1 m/s cruising velocity.
and the physical simulation time is 35 s. The total Figures 4 and 5 show several stagnation areas
number of SPH particles, including boundary around submarine surface, with highest pressures
particles, is about 60 million. achieved around the bow, surface imager, and benthic
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION sample acquisition system. As expected, the gage
Both ANSYS© FLUENT© and SPH simulations stagnation pressure is approximately equal to the
are presented in this section. The results are organized value of the dynamic pressure of the undisturbed flow.
as follows: first a view of the velocity and pressure Similar results are obtained when the submarine
contours around the entire submarine hull in deeply components are analyzed separately, as is the case in
submerged conditions are shown. Then, a few Figures 6  11, where pressure contours of several
screenshots of the same flow are presented for single submarine components are depicted. The drag force is
parts of the submarine, such as the hydrodynamic skin calculated for some of these components and
or the phased array antenna. Finally, snapshots of the compared with series of calculations presented in [2]
flow field and force results obtained via SPH for the based on empirical models and a collection of
submarine in surfaced condition are included at the historical datasets. The comparison of these values
end of this section. with present simulations is shown in Table 1 for the

4 Copyright © 2017 by ASME

following components: bare hull, antenna, pods, side
scan sonar array and omni antenna.

Table 1. Results obtained herein compared against [2].

Drag force [lbf] from FLUENT© % Difference
Bare hull 3.02 7.9
Phased array antenna 0.91 4.2
Pods 1.72 0.11
Side scan sonar array 0.07 30
X-band omni antenna 0.11 47

Figure 9. Pressure contours on the X-band omni antenna.

Figure 6. Pressure contours on the hydrodynamic skin.

Figure 10. Pressure contours on the side scan sonar array.

Figure 7. Pressure contours on the mast, surface imager,

meteorology sensor, and omni antenna.

Figure 11. Pressure contours on the stabilizer.

An overall good agreement is seen between

Figure 8. Pressure contours on the phased array antenna.
simulations and hand calculations, with some
discrepancies observed for the last two components
and likely due to their shape and interference with
adjacent hull components. Nevertheless these parts
account for only the 2% of the total drag.

5 Copyright © 2017 by ASME

Figure 12. Contours of SPH velocity at the submarine
centerplane for a 1 m/s velocity and in surfaced condition.
Figure 13. Contours of SPH vorticity at the submarine
centerplane for a 1 m/s velocity and in surfaced condition.
A series of preliminary results is also presented for
SPH simulations of the submarine in surfaced
condition. Particularly, Figures 12 and 13 show the
velocity and vorticity contours in the submarine
centerplane as it traverses the sea at a cruising speed
of 1 m/s. In both case a wake can be seen, extending
for several lengths behind the submarine. From the
vorticity plot, fluid rotation can be observed as a result
of the interaction between the flow and the cowlings,
with the formation of an oscillatory pattern typical of
fluid flow past a solid object. A partial stern
ventilation can also be observed as the free-surface
elevation slightly decreases near the submarine
rudder. This effect is only mild and does not affect the
hydrodynamic pressure.
Figure 14. Top view of free-surface elevation obtained with
SPH after 35 seconds of simulated physical time.
A top view of the free-surface elevation is shown
in Figure 14, with the quantity z/L representing the
ratio of the depth to the submarine length overall.
The classic wave pattern observed on Earth for ships
[11, 15, 16] is also seen here as a group of bow and
stern waves propagates at an angle with respect to the
cruising direction. Larger crests and troughs are seen
in the first wave while the amplitude attenuates away
from the craft. The geometry of the stern is such that
waves generated in its proximity do not have the
typical form of transverse waves of ships, i.e.
perpendicular to the direction of motion, but follow
that of bow waves, though their amplitude is
significantly lower.
Figure 15. Components of SPH fluid force on the submarine.
The (x, y, z) components of the total
hydrodynamic force on the submarine hull are plotted
in Figure 15. The y-force, which is in the direction of
sway, is zero from symmetry considerations.
6 Copyright © 2017 by ASME
 The z-force (heave) converges to a steady-state
value at around 5 seconds of simulations and its value
simply represents the buoyant force. Finally, the x-
force, which represents the total hydrodynamic drag,
converges around the value of -250 N after about 10
seconds of simulated physical time. Based on this
preliminary result, the minimum power needed to
overcome the total drag must thus be equal to the
thrust times the submarine velocity, which in this case
yields a power of 250 W.
CONCLUSIONS
A Computational Fluid Dynamics study is
conducted for an extraterrestrial submarine cruising
the seas of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
In the case of deep submergence, Navier–Stokes
based code (ANSYS© FLUENT©) is utilized,
showing velocity and pressure contours, and
integrated total drag force. Comparisons with the
isolated components-based analysis that does not take
into account of interference show qualitative
agreement. Navier-Stokes solutions also indicate
pressure and velocity features as expected.
Specific cases of surface missions are analyzed using
the particle method code DualSPHysics that yields
relevant information about wave generation and fluid
forces. Observations from the free-surface elevation
contours clearly demonstrate the classical Kelvin
waves development for surface operations.
Future studies will attempt to merge, in a methodical
fashion, the convergence of these approaches when
the particle method is implemented at gradual depths
of submergence and both methods being used
descending and ascending with an angle of attack
from and toward the free-surface, respectively.
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