Zachary Cooper-Baldock

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PhD Candidate at Flinders University

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) encounter significant energy, control and navigation challenges in complex underwater environments, particularly during close-proximity operations, such as launch and recovery (LAR), where fluid interactions and wake effects present additional navigational and energy challenges. Traditional path planning method...

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are crucial in automotive, aerospace, maritime and medical applications, but are limited by the complexity, cost and computational requirements of directly calculating the flow, often taking days of compute time. Machine-learning architectures, such as controlled generative adversarial networks (cGANs)...

Autonomous underwater vehicles have seen widespread adoption across industrial, scientific, and defence applications. They are typically utilized to perform oceanic mapping, surveillance, and inspection-type missions. Hovering AUVs, used for inspection applications, are over-actuated vehicles incorporating multiple thrusters to enable multiple degr...

The development of extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicles (XLUUVs) presents an opportunity for transporting smaller uncrewed or autonomous underwater vehicles (UUV/AUVs) over long distances, within an XLUUV's payload bay, enabling energy-constrained AUVs to spend longer periods on station rather than in transit to-and-from their operational areas...

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is the simulation of fluid flow undertaken with the use of computational hardware. The underlying equations are computationally challenging to solve and necessitate high performance computing (HPC) to resolve in a practical timeframe when a reasonable level of fidelity is required. The simulations are memory inten...

Methane pyrolysis in molten catalyst bubble (MCB) column reactors is an emerging technology that enables the simultaneous production of hydrogen and solid carbon, together with a mechanism for separating the two coproducts. In this process, methane is dispersed as bubbles into a high temperature molten catalyst bath producing hydrogen and low-densi...

Extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles (XLUUVs) present an opportunity to launch and recover (LAR) smaller autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) covertly in contested regions, increasing their operational range, time on station, data transmission and operational safety. Berthing onboard an XLUUV is fundamentally different to berthing with static...