A multidisciplinary collaborative design approach for blended-wing-body underwater glider

With the ever-increasing demands on product performance, product system design becomes increasingly complex. As a typical complex system, a blended-wing-body underwater glider (BWBUG) involves various disciplines, which overlap and influence the system's performance, causing difficulties in system design. To bridge the gap, a multidisciplinary collaborative design (MCD) approach of BWBUG is proposed in the conceptual design stage. Firstly, a general MCD framework of the complex system is constructed using system decomposing and integration, the MCD is divided into five levels (system, sub-system, discipline, task, and component), and the design link is built for each level. Then, the detailed system decomposing, multidisciplinary collaborative modeling, and simulation of BWBUGs that are established involves nine disciplines, including hydrodynamic shape, layout, skeleton, buoyancy, attitude, energy, detection and control, buoyancy material, and skin. The system performance model (carrying capacity, endurance, and detection area) is built based on the above disciplines, and a distributed architecture is established for system integration using muti-software and nodes based on the system performance. The design results obtained through this approach demonstrate its effectiveness for the system design of BWBUGs.