Concept Tests for a New Wire Flying Vehicle Designed to Achieve High Horizontal Resolution Profiling in Deep Water

Efficiently profiling the water column to achieve both high vertical and horizontal resolution from amoving vessel in deep water is difficult. Current solutions, such as CTD tow-yos, moving vessel profilers, and un-dulating tow bodies, are limited by ship speed or water depth. As a consequence, it is difficult to obtain oceanographic sections with sufficient resolution to identify many relevant scales over the deeper sections of the water column. This paper presents a new concept for a profiling vehicle that slides up and down a towed wire in a controlled manner using the lift created by wing foils. The wings provide a novel low-power method of propulsion along the cable by using the free stream velocity of the wire moving through the water in similar fashion to a sailboat sailing up wind. Scale model tests show a wide range of achievable profiling glide slopes for tow cable angles between vertical and 458, and effective isolation of cable strum vibration from the towe