Buoyancy driven underwater gliders, which locomote by modulating their buoyancy and their attitude with moving mass actuators and inflatable bladders, are proving their worth as efficient long-distance, long-duration ocean sampling platforms. Gliders have the capability to travel thousands of kilometers without a need to stop or recharge. There is a need for the development of methods for hydrodynamic modeling. This thesis aims to determine the hydrodynamic parameters for the governing equations of motion for three autonomous underwater vehicles. This approach is two fold, using data obtained from computational flight tests and using a semi-empirical approach. The three vehicles which this thesis focuses on are two gliders (Slocum and XRay/Liberdade), and a third vehicle, the Virginia Tech Miniature autonomous underwater vehicle. / Master of Science

In this thesis, store separation from two different configurations are solved using computational methods. Two different commercially available CFD codes / CFD-FASTRAN, an implicit Euler solver, and an unsteady panel method solver USAERO, coupled with integral boundary layer solution procedure are used for the present computations. The computational trajectory results are validated against the available experimental data of a generic wing-pylon-store configuration at Mach 0.95. Major trends of the separation are captured. Same configuration is used for the comparison of unsteady panel method with Euler solution at Mach 0.3 and 0.6. Major trends are similar to each other while some differences in lateral and longitudinal displacements are observed. Trajectories of a fueltank separated from an F-16 fighter aircraft wing and full aircraft configurations are found at Mach 0.3 using only the unsteady panel code. The results indicate that the effect of fuselage is to decrease the drag and to increase the side forces acting on the separating fueltank from the aircraft. It is also observed that the yawing and rolling directions of the separating fueltank are reversed when it is separated from the full aircraft configuration when compared to the separation from the wing alone configuration.