Additively manufactured lightweight autonomous underwater vehicle for marine applications

Countless marine applications are attracted by the perspective of structural weight reduction combined with excellent mechanical performance. Combination of sandwich solutions with additive manufacturing technologies could be successful to target - in addition to weight reduction - other strategic issues such as crashworthiness or vibrations damping. Additive manufacturing integration in marine sandwich structures design would allow the adoption of complex geometries and shapes, which can be tailored to achieve significant benefits. In the current work, hulls of autonomous underwater vehicle were identified as a promising marine application for additive manufacturing structures. Several alternative concepts obtainable with additive manufacturing technologies were suggested, each based on a sandwich design with different core configuration. Numerical analyses were performed to investigate the critical buckling pressure of each structure, which was related to the achievable weight reduction in comparison to a commercial design, in order to investigate the potentialities of additive manufactured lightweight designs.