Abstract
A novel dish-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is named autonomous underwater helicopter (AUH) with excellent maneuverability, controllability in hovering near the seabed and landing on the sea bottom. In this paper, the panel method was applied to predict added mass, inertial hydrodynamic performance of the AUH by ANSYS-AQWA, a well-known potential computer code. Case study of added mass of analytic sphere and spheroid geometries with known theoretical solutions was carried out by this method. The validation results found that the panel method is accuracy. The added mass tensor of the AUH was estimated to study the inertial effects caused by the variations of the clearance between sea bottom and the AUH approaching the seabed. The simulation results show that the added mass coefficients increase linearly with the decrease of the bottom clearance. These results suggest that the ANSYS-AQWA computer program could be used to analyze the inertial hydrodynamic interaction between an AUV and seabed for the purpose of enhanced controllability.