Numerical Investigation of Lift Force Increase in a Hovercraft by Changing the Geometrical Parameters of Flow Transfer Part and Air Channel

Hovercraft is a modern air-cushion vehicle (ACV) that has the ability to move on a variety of surfaces, such as water and land. The distinguishing feature of the hovercraft and other vessels is that the hovercrafts are deployed on a layer of air and then propelled, which is a major factor in the faster movement of them. In fact, this is a unique feature of the hovercraft, which makes it possible to use various military, recreational, transportation, and, research limitations/implications and so on. In this paper, the numerical study of the incompressible turbulent air flow in a steady state of the hovercraft suspension system is discussed. For this purpose, hovercraft is modeled in CATIA software. After transferring to the Ansys-Fluent software and applying the boundary conditions, and solving the equations governing the problem, the results are presented as pressure, velocity and curve of the lift force. In this research, we have tried to observe the effect of changing the profile of the flow transfer part and air channel on the distribution of pressure and velocity as well as the lift force applied to the substructure. Finally, the most suitable form for the distribution of the pressure and the amount of lift force from the presented profiles was the flow transfer part profile with a gradient of 8 degrees, which showed improvement in the result from the initial profile. It was also found that the deformations applied to the channel sectional profile did not improve the rate of initial lift force of the hovercraft.