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Ultrafine ternary carbide Co6W6C@C nanoparticles (NPs) were successfully synthesized and these NPs exhibited high catalytic activities for hydrazine oxidation reaction (HzOR) under alkaline conditions. In a practical O2-hydrazine fuel cell...

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The self-propulsion test of underwater vehicles is the key technique for predicting and evaluating the navigation performance of these submersibles. In this study, the numerical simulation of a standard propeller JD7704+Ka4-70 is first presented and the results are compared with experiments to validate the numerical approaches. The reason why the propulsion efficiency of the ducted propeller is higher than that of the conventional propeller is explored. Then, the paper proposes a series of numerical simulations conducted to test the performance of the ducted propeller designed according to the JD7704+Ka4-70 in order to match with the unmanned semi-submerged vehicle (USSV), and the propeller’s open water characteristic curves are obtained. The results show a reasonable agreement with the regression analysis. Afterwards, the numerical simulations focus on a self-propulsion test of the USSV with the designed ducted propeller and the self-propulsion point is obtained. The streamlines through the hull as well as the ducted propellers are clearly obtained, together with the velocity distributions of the propeller plane. The results vividly demonstrate the hydrodynamic performance of the USSV with the designed propellers. In this paper, all the CFD simulations are based on the numerical software, Star-CCM+, and use the Reynolds-averaged Navier‒Stokes (RANS) equations with the shear stress transport (SST) k-omega turbulence model.

The underwater vehicle-manipulator systems (UVMS) face significant challenges in trajectory tracking and motion planning because of external disturbance (current and payload) and kinematic redundancy. Former algorithms can finish the tracking of end-effector (EE) and free of singularity redundancy solution alone. However, only a few analytical studies have been conducted on coordinated motion planning of UVMS considering the dynamics controller. This article introduces a combined dynamics and kinematics networked fuzzy task priority motion planning method to solve the above problems. It avoids the assumption of perfect dynamic control. Firstly, to eliminate the kinematics error, a dynamic transformation method from joint space to task space is proposed. Without chattering, an outer loop sliding mode controller is designed for tracking EE’s trajectory. Further, to ensure the underwater vehicle’ posture stability and joint constraint, a task priority frame with kinematics error is used to planning the coordinated motion of UVMS, in which the posture and joint limits map into the null space of prioritized tasks, and weight gains are adopted to guarantee orthogonality of secondary tasks. On top of that, the gain weighted are updated by the networked fuzzy logic. The proposed algorithm achieves better coordinated motion planning and tracking performance. Effectiveness is validated by numerical simulation.