A much more ambitious application of the same techniques is found in this design for a U S Navy “Patrol Boat Multimission.” The requirement was for a stealthy boat for special operations, with a “mission module” that could be separately engineered and outfitted and hot swapped. The primary requirement was low observability in two areas: reduction of the radar profile of generated mist and of the sound profile by hull/wave interaction. Our solution was a planing hull, normally the worst approach, and for high speeds (and agility) rather impractical in any case. The innovation was a flexible portion of the hull, controlled by a fine grid of microactuators. These sensed the fine-grained behavior of the fluid (using sensors not explained here) and immediately reconfiguring the local geometry of the hull and/or pulsing the boundary. The effect could be optimized for speed, low observables, or crew comfort. The basic theory derived from understanding of fluid boundaries from the soft model proof-of-concept studies for the wind turbine problem. Here, the input was stochastic and the calculation of the form in real time. Issues of controlling the actuators were an interesting but unrelated problem.
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