Computational fluid dynamics-based system identification of marine vehicles

In this paper, a new computational fluid dynamics-based system identification for marine vehicles (such as ships and underwater vehicles) is proposed. The procedure has the advantage of being quite intuitive due to its clear similarity with conventional practical system identification experiments. This helps the user to quickly setup reliable simulation experiments and eliminates lengthy abstraction/ modeling that is often needed to perform a practical experiment in simulation. The simulation times are quite reasonable and can be performed using opensource software, thus eliminating the high cost and “time-consuming”ness typically associated with conventional practical experiments-based system identification. Two case studies are used to demonstrate the procedure as well as a discussion of candidate applications where it may prove to be useful.