Computational and Experimental Investigation of a Negative Pressure Effect Plate for Underwater Inspection Robots

We present a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of a Negative Pressure Effect Plate (NPEP) that generates a large force for stabilizing the positions and orientations of underwater robots. For designing NPEPs and improving the mathematical model of NPEPs, we applied a CFD method to understand hydrodynamic phenomena occurring around the NPEP. For the simulation, we analyze the pressure and flow distributions inside of the NPEPs with different diameters. We also conducted an experiment to evaluate the performance of one NPEP and for comparison with CFD results. Comparison of the experimental and numerical results, revealed some clues for design and prediction model improvement of the NPEP.