With the growing development of autonomous underwater vehicles technology, research on conducting long-term underwater mission is gaining popularity. To address the urgent need for timely and efficient charging of autonomous underwater vehicles, a hybrid-energy powered mobile platform is proposed for autonomous underwater vehicles charging under deep-sea environments. The mobile platform integrates two vertical-axis wind turbines, solar panels, and a small waterplane area twin-hull ship, offering a self-sustained power supply system. First, the platform's static stability and large angle stability is checked through Maxsurf Stability. Afterwards, the 6-DOF RAOs and short-term response of the integrated system is verified through a frequency-domain hydrodynamic analysis based on potential flow theory. An aerodynamic simulation of applied wind turbine is conducted. The analysis results demonstrate that through optimizing the hull design, including shape, dimensions, and the implement of the vertical-axis wind turbines and solar panels, the integrated system achieves good stability. The preliminary conceptual design in this paper provides an alternative choice for the charging of autonomous underwater vehicles especially under deep-sea environment.
Li et al. (Sun,) studied this question.