The Form Deformation And Aerodynamic Performance Of Three-dimensional Flexible Sails

In the world's energy shortage situation, it has been paid more and more attention on the sails which are used for ship assistance. And the differences between aerodynamic characteristics will make an impact on the capability of ship assistance. They are two kinds of sails,one is hard sail,the other is fexible sail.It is easier to study the aerodynamic characteristics of hard sails,because of fixed geometrical structure.But it is harder to study the aerodynamic characteristics of fexible sails,because of the geometrical structure is changing with the wind.The main idea of this paper is to study isotropic flexible sails and orthotropic flexible sails.The drive of the sails under high attack angle and low attack angle are very different.the drive under high attack angle is lift, but under low attack angle is resistance.The author derivatives detailedly implementation steps of stream function method and impenetrability method based on vortex distribution panel method theory, and use stream function method to process numerical simulation of the form of orthotropic flexible sails under low attack angle.And uses stress strain relations and local minimum points of the total potential energy function method theories to process numerical simulation of the form of flexible sails under high attack angle. At last, the author utilizes a commercial CFD software to simulate the aerodynamic characteristics of flexible sails.It's indicated that the simulation results gained from these methods approximate the trial data and have referrence value.