Design and Simulation of New Versions of Tube Launched UAV Y. Zhou and A. M. Anvar School of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Adelaide Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Emails: 990828698@qq.com; amir.m.anvar@gmail.com Abstract: Currently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used on exploring and monitoring the oceans. Such as a Tube Launched UAV (TLUAV), that may tightly pack into a water-resistant narrow tube and can be conveyed via an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). After the TIUAV launched on the sea- surface, with having onboard automated, command, control, and navigation systems, it can easily reach to the high cruising-radius. There are several fully developed TLUAVs, such as ‘MAVERIC’ designed by Prioria Robotics Company, enlisting in a number of applications including with the United States Army. With the development of a large-scaled economically viable TLUAVs, they can support the exploration of the ocean resources, search and rescue missions, operational recognizance and surveillance missions, and so on. The goal of this research was to compare the performance between different types of Tube launched UAV under different sea states with diverse wind directions, and further more to optimize a new version, which may achieve better performance. There are two new versions have been developed in this project, which are the unfurling-methods of structure of the flexible UAV wings. One version was inspired from the bat wings and umbrella’s pulley system respectively, and the idea of the other version comes from the process of the birds’ wings during takeoff procedure. The wings of both models can be opened automatically after the UAV launched from the tube-launcher by its control system, and can be locked and fixed when the wings are fully unfurled. For the monitoring purpose, due to the advantages of low speed of the TLUAV and its stability on air, it can carry several small sensors including with a small real-time video camera, to be able to monitor a pre- specified part of the surface ocean. In this case, the unmanned air-robot is designed to perform with the cruise speed of 10 m/s. In addition, the new models designed and investigated within this research are compared versus the existing TLUAV models under different wind velocities and based on the sea states 0, 1 and 2, as well as various wind directions including with windward and crosswind conditions. Furthermore, in this research study, a comparison of the lift-force, drag-force and side-force of the TLUAV model by using the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) method is investigated. Moreover, the results were compared with the popular models including with the MAVERIC model and other civilian versions to show the differences and improvements. Keywords: UAV, tube launched, sea state ,CFD 21st International Congress on Modelling and Simulation, Gold Coast, Australia, 29 Nov to 4 Dec 2015 www.mssanz.org.au/modsim2015 753