An Improved Experimental Framework of Amphibious Marine Vehicle Hull Hydrodynamics

With the increase of anthropogenic oceanic activities, a great number of innovative marine vehicles have been proposed and developed in the past few decades. Among these new vehicles, the amphibious marine vehicle is considered one of the most unique as it operates in air and water. This unique mode of operation necessitates simultaneous and coupled analyses of the aerodynamic and hydrodynamic performance. However, most of the existing methods are still not able to separate and resolve the hydrodynamic behavior of the hull from the coupled system, which hinders in-depth research and development of such vehicles. To advance the understanding of the amphibious vehicle and support a more comprehensive design process, in this article, we propose an improved experimental framework that can decouple the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic effects. As a result, the hydrodynamic performance data retrieved under this framework can be scaled to a prototype by Froude's similarity law. Using a scaled model, a comparative analysis is performed to demonstrate the advantages of the new framework. Results show that the new framework not only can isolate aerodynamics and hydrodynamics loads from each other, but also provides a more scalable and reliable resistance coefficient compared with those obtained from the existing frameworks. Furthermore, this framework can also reveal more detailed hydroplaning lift characteristics, which constitute a crucial feature in amphibious vehicle analysis. Moving forward, this new framework is expected to serve as a more accurate platform to derive a data-enhanced explanatory model, which will facilitate multidisciplinary design and optimization on an amphibious marine vehicle.