U-Kite development

Abstract

The Following thesis describes the work which was undertaken in the conception, development, and the construction of an open sea towed vehicle used to deploy a wide range of oceanographic monitoring equipment. This streamlined submersible vehicle, is towed alongside a ship or small vessel, and remains slightly buoyant at all times, but once it is moving it uses its wings which are configured upside-down with respect to those on an aircraft to pull it down to depth and move it away from the towing vessels wake and wave system, while assuring lateral stability. The Preliminary design requirement called for a light, robust, stable, simple, and low cost platform able to operate in a close to rough sea surface, and can be worked from a relatively small vessels such as those used for surveys of estuaries and coastal. During the design phase of this project, tools such as parametric feature based solid modelling, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element analysis were employed to provide a solution to the problem. A prototype was built using CADCAM technology, and strong composite materials.