Investigating the Effect of Geometric Shape on Air Cushion Lift Force

One of the crucial and challenging issues for researchers is presenting an appropriate approach to evaluate the aerodynamic characteristics of air cushion vehicles (ACVs) in terms of system design parameters. One of these issues includes introducing a suitable approach to analyze the effect of geometric shapes on the aerodynamic characteristics of ACVs. The main novelty of this paper lies in presenting an innovative method to study the geometric shape effect on air cushion lift force, which has not been investigated thus far. Moreover, this paper introduces a new approximate mathematical formula for calculating the air cushion lift force in terms of parameters, including the air gap, lateral gaps, air inlet velocity, and scaling factor for the first time. Thus, we calculate the aerodynamic lift force applied to nine different shapes of the air cushions used in the ACVs in the present paper through the ANSYS Fluent software. The geometrical shapes studied in this paper are rectangular, square, equilateral triangle, circular, elliptic shapes, and four other combined shapes, including circle-rectangle, circle-square, hexagonal, and fillet square. Results showed that the cushion with a circular pattern produces the highest lift force among other geometric shapes with the same conditions. The increase in the cushion lift force can be attributed to the fillet with a square shape and its increasing radius compared with the square shape.