Water entry impact cushioning performance of mitigator for AUV

The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) will suffer severe impact load during the water entry, sometime this load may cause structural failure of AUV. In order to decrease the impact load level, a design and cushioning properties analysis of mitigator for AUV is presented in this paper. Numerical simulations based on Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method are carried out so as to study the mitigation characteristic of designed mitigator. The cushioning properties of different mitigator length and density are shown. In addition, the cushioning performance of these factors on the compaction and fragmentation process of mitigator and the mitigation mechanism are obtained by the flow filed visualization techniques.