Exploring the possibility of using flapping foils as a marine propulsor

Abstract

The scope of this thesis is to produce a CFD program capable of simulating most of flapping foil systems, verify the capability to produce reliable results, run systematic simulations and visualize them, in order to look for the emergence of patterns that could lead to improvements. Additionally, there is also an attempt to start reverse engineering the fish and dolphin swimming. For this purpose a CFD program was made, using a boundary element time stepping method with free wake, which can take any given foil (or foils) and place it under any harmonic flapping motion given by the user. The program can calculate pressures, consequently forces and moments, nondimentionalize them and produce the wake geometry in visualizable form. From the simulations made, emerged results capable to produce improvements to the flapping foil systems, as well as recomendations for future work.