Investigation of structural stability characteristics of high speed underwater vehicles according to mass change

In this study, the investigation of structural unstable characteristics of high speed underwater vehicles is performed. For simplicity, a real vehicle was modeled as a follower force subjected beam that was resting on an elastic foundation, and the lumped mass effect was simplified as an elastic intermediate support. The stability of the simplified model was numerically analyzed based on the Finite Element Method (FEM). This numerical simulation revealed that flutter type instability or divergence type instability occurs, depending on the position and stiffness of the elastic intermediate support, which implies that the instability of the real model is affected by the position and size of the lumped mass.