Parameter Tuning of the Autonomous Boat in Fish Farming Industry with Design of Experiment

This research studied the feasibility in applying the flight controller of the unmanned aerial vehicle on a pontoon boat in fish farming industry. A small-scale autonomous pontoon boat has been built, equipped with the open-hardware flight controller, GPS receiver, Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and the magnetometer. A 23 factorial design based on Design of Experiment (DOE) is carried out to study the influence of three parameters (turn_rate, turn_angle and damping) on the response variable (peak-to-peak deviation from the desired trajectory). Total 24 experiments have been conducted by setting the desired trajectory as a circle with diameter 20 m. The peak-to-peak deviation in each experiment has been observed. The analyses revealed that the damping has low interaction with the turn angle and turn rate while there is a stronger interaction between the turn angle and turn rate. And the peak-to-peak deviation of the trajectory tends to decrease when the parameter damping was set to high value. The regression model has been derived and plotted as a response surface.  The optimized parameters were selected from the plot and perform the experiment with three replications. The results confirm that parameters tuning has improved the performance of the boat significantly. With the DOE approach, the impact of two or more parameters on a response, the interaction between parameters can be investigated systematically. This approach is an effective way to tuning the parameters and can be applied to various kinds of the autonomous vehicle.   A 23 factorial design based on Design of Experiment (DOE) is carried out to study the influence of three parameters (turn_rate, turn_angle and damping) on the response variable (peak-to-peak deviation from the desired trajectory). Total 24 experiments have been conducted by setting the desired trajectory as a circle with diameter 20 m. The peak-to-peak deviation in each experiment has been observed.   The analyses revealed that the damping has low interaction with the turn angle and turn rate while there is a stronger interaction between the turn angle and turn rate. And the peak-to-peak deviation of the trajectory tends to decrease when the parameter damping was set to high value. The regression model has been derived and plotted as a response surface.  The optimized parameters were selected from the plot and perform the experiment with three replications. The results confirm that parameters tuning has improved the performance of the boat significantly.   With the DOE approach, the impact of two or more parameters on a response, the interaction between parameters can be investigated systematically. This approach is an effective way to tuning the parameters and can be applied to various kinds of the autonomous vehicle

Optimization of a Hybrid Carbon/Glass Composites Afterbody of the Amphibious Plane with Finite Element Analysis

The main objective of this research is to find the optimized lay up for theafterbody of the amphibious plane which can carried load according to ASTM F2245(Standard Specification for Design and Performance of a Light Sport Airplane).The finite element analyses of hybrid carbon/glass composites are carried out usingANSYS ACP under assumption that the hybrid carbon/glass fiber composites couldcombine the strong sides of carbon and glass fiber reinforced polymer to balance betweenstrength, weight and cost to achieve the requirement for each design of the aircraft.While the stress of the carbon and glass fiber in the structure are within the safety limit,the results show that the weight is minimum when the laminate ply pattern consists of 3.18mm foam core (D) sandwiched by 3 layers of carbon woven fabrics on both side[(±45)C(0/90)C(±45)CD̅]S. While the laminate ply pattern with 3.18 mm foam coresandwiched by 2 layers of carbon and 1 layer of glass woven fabric[(±45)C(0/90)C(±45)GD̅]S on both side have a good balance between weight and cost

A Numerical Comparative Study of the Selected Cambered and Reflexed Airfoils in Ground Effect

When a wing gets closer to the ground, the distortion of the flow and the dynamic air cushion have a positive influence on the aerodynamic characteristics. The vessels that utilize the advantage of this phenomenon in its operation are known as “Wing-in-ground effect craft” or WIG. However, the aerodynamic forces in ground effects are different from free stream flight, especially close to the ground. The center of pressure movement was found to be more complicated and varies with the ground clearance, angle of attack, and the airfoil profile which results in pitching instability in some cases. In this study, a numerical study comparing the aerodynamic characteristics of three commonly used airfoils and one reflexed airfoil in ground effect was carried out with the ground clearance ratio varying from 5% to 100% of the chord at a Reynolds number of 3 106 over a wide range of angles of attack from 0° to 20°. As expected, the high-cambered airfoil has the highest lift-to-drag ratio, but the stall occurs at a smaller angle of attack, especially at low ground clearance. It also has a greater center of pressure travel with a strong nose-down moment. The expected reduction of the movement of the center of pressure was obtained in the reflexed airfoil, resulting in better pitching stability at the expense of performance. The performance of the flat-bottom airfoils is compromised between the high-cambered and reflexed airfoil

Parametric Optimization of NACA 4412 Airfoil in Ground Effect Using Full Factorial Design of Experiment

This investigation emphasizes the changes of the lift-to-drag ratio of an airfoil with the variation of ground clearance and angles of attack. Various ground clearances and angles of attack with a fixed speed of 30 m/s are applied to the NACA 4412 airfoil. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to calculate the aerodynamic coefficients acting on it. To study the influence of these two factors on the lift-to-drag ratio, 32 factorial design based on Design of Experiments (DOE) is utilized. A total of 9 numerical experiments were carried out with Ansys Fluent. When the angle of attack decreases, lift coefficient increases and drag coefficient decreases resulting in a high lift-to-drag ratio: also, the lower the ground clearance, the higher the lift-to-drag ratio. It shows the effectiveness of ground clearance and angle of attack. The analysis shows that either increasing ground clearance or using a higher angle of attack gives a decrement in the lift-to-drag ratio, but there is no interaction between them