non-linear 6 DoF modelling and simulation of a wings-in-ground effect marine vehicle

This thesis is part of a project from UPM, universidad politecnica de Madrid, of designing and building an autonomous electrically powered full scale ekranoplane, a kind of vehicle that was firstly developed in the 1970s and didn't have much of a history after that. Starting from scratch a simulator for an ekranoplan with 6-dof is built for the purpose of providing a benchmarking tool for the design of advanced contollers and trajectory planners that are gonna be later developed during the course of the project. The first part addresses the issue of the aerodynamic forces, evaluating many different sources and previous works. A research as been done about the ground effect, the main challenge when dealing with ekranoplanes, and the different methods used to deal with the issue of such peculiar behaviour of aerodynamics in the close vicinity of ground. A custom built CFD tool with some limitations has been developed by a team mate, and it has been used to develop a first model of the forces. Such model cannot be considered definitive, but for sure represents a good starting point for further improvements. Using the CFD tool many different configurations are analysed and a method for integrating all the results in a more precise way then a simple linear series expansion is used. This method is going to be used in the future too, when more detailed simulations and new tools will have been developed. Finally the simulator is built using the openModelica enviroment, in a modular way, to be ready for the controller integration and further modifications. The simulator is enclosed in a virtual machine that runs Ubuntu, in order to be portable and easy to install on every other machine, saving time on installations and platform problems.