Public defence: Moustafa Elkolali
Moustafa Elkolali defended his thesis for the PhD in Engineering Science with “Development of a deep miniature underwater glider”.
Moustafa Elkolali defended his thesis for the PhD in Engineering Science with “Development of a deep miniature underwater glider”.
Trial lecture: "Ocean exploration - challenges and opportunities using low-cost robotic approaches”.
Opponents:
Supervisors:
One of the limitations to a greater understanding and stable growth of marine scientific activities is the significant cost of ocean monitoring systems.
The concept of this collaborative research work is to propose a miniature underwater glider capable of highly reducing human intervention by automating its operation.
Underwater gliders are autonomous vehicles that alter their buoyancy to operate in vertical cycles and use wings to provide a lift force, which acts perpendicular to the movement path. The resultant of the vertical buoyancy force and the wing-generated lift is a saw tooth movement.
The aim of this work is to present the mechanical design of a miniature underwater glider capable of working in a depth up to 1000 meter and weighing less than 10 kg to allow an autonomous deployment and recovery using unmanned aerial vehicle.
Reaching deep ranges is more efficient since the efficiency of the glider depends on its working depth. Working in a shallow environment is less efficient, as the glider has to alter its buoyancy more often by activating the buoyancy engine, which consumes battery power.
The glider acts as a platform with main tasks that include measuring ambient water properties such as temperature, salinity, and CDOM (Coloured Dissolved Organic Matter).
The introduced work enables the reduction of size and weight of the current legacy gliders on market.
With 80 percent of our oceans still not explored, the author hope that this research will be of good reference for future work, and that this multi-domain work may contribute to better well-needed research in the field of ocean and marine engineering.
Although the vehicle is designed and tested, many aspects need further development, whether it is in the guidance and control, the efficiency of the vehicle, or in the energy capacity.