COMPUTER SIMULATED TRENDS IN DESIGNING A FUTURE UNMANNED UNDERWATER VEHICLE 'MOTHERHSIP' SUBMARINE

摘要

The concept of an Unmanned Vehicle (UXV) 'mother-ship' submarine has already been explored by Pawling and Andrews. This was driven as a response to the proliferation of conventional submarines amongst an increasing number of nation states. A UXV mothership submarine would have the ability to deploy UXVs from the host submarine, with a force multiplication effect. Building on the 2011 paper, a further investigation into the feasibility of designing a mothership submarine is being carried out at UCL. A computer program called SUPERB, written in the programming language Matlab, has been constructed to enable a wide range of submarine concepts to be investigated, with each design having its own unique set of design requirements. By using the computer program to provide a very large data set of submarine concepts, the resultant design studies can be then displayed on a plot to identify the Pareto front for a cost versus submarine capability relationship. This paper shows SUPERB being partially validated through benchmarking against a typical modern day nuclear powered submarine. SUPERB incorporates a newly developed geometric arrangement tool called Compartment X-Listing. Using the Pareto front insights, analysis of trends, such as locating the 'knee in the curve', can be used to design future UXV mothership submarine options, which are naval architecturally balanced at a concept design level. To date, the observed impact of an operational effective mix of large and small UXVs on the mothership submarine options is considerable, with implications for fleet mix.