Conceptual design and comparative CFD analyses on unmanned amphibious vehicle for crack detection

Abstract

Nowadays, Unmanned Amphibious Vehicles (UAVs) is being suggested for critical applications like fish detection, difficult mapping and atmosphere studies. One such filed are surface cracks inspection and in specific a big structure like dams might suffer a lot due to external structural cracks. As dams are being considered the cracks not only exist over the water surface it might also exist underwater, to inspect such cracks an UAV carrying with sensors is required. The major unique feature applied in this underwater vehicle is a common material for both the environments with the help of Kevlar composite. Generally, impact load withstanding capability is high in the Kevlar, which shortlisted Kevlar as suitable for an amphibious vehicle. For the purpose of inspection, image processing photogrammetric method is followed, in which the external surface of the dam is captured by a high definition camera which can take pictures in both air and in water is used. The pictures are then stitched together to get a complete pictorial view of the external surface of the dam. From the surface is further inspected to detect cracks and other structural defects. The entire image processing has been analyzed with the help of MATLAB, in addition to that the photogrammetric method is also suggested for crack detection. For the theoretical design approach of a UAV has been carried out for the purpose of components selection and thereby the conceptual design of UAV is modeled with the help of CATIA V5. The integrated working environment have been analyzed with the help of ANSYS Workbench 16.2.