Ta'idoussis 



the body housing the sonar device is towed deeply submerged by sur- 

 face craft, for the purpose of hydrographic survey, submarine 

 detection, or location of schools of fish. We must refer to the work 

 of Strandhagen and Thomas [ 6] , Richardson [ 7] , Laitinen [ 8] , 

 Patton and Schram [ 9] , Jeffrey [ 10] , Schram and Reyle [ li] , and 

 Whicker [ 12] . The stability problem for the sonar-type towed bodies 

 is of course quite similar to that of a towed glider [ 5j . The work 

 referred to here deeds with the dynamics of the towed body systena 

 as a whole; the geometry of the towed body for these applications 

 tends to be fairly comiplex, cuid the analysis quite elaborate, 



A considerable amount of work also exists on the equilibrium 

 configuration and the dynamics of towing cables, starting with McLeod's 

 [13] and Relf and Powell's [ 14] work, to more recent work by 

 Landweber and Protter [ 15] , Pode [ 16] , [ 17] , O'Hara [ 18] , Kochin 

 [ 19] , Eames [ 20] , and Albas iny and Day [ 21] ; this represents a by 

 no means exhaustive list of references. 



The author's interest in this field comes from work associ- 

 ated with yet another application: that of the Dracone flexible barge, 

 which is a flexible sausage -like container towed behind a small crait, 

 and used for the transportation of oil and other lighter-than-water 

 cargoes, including the sea transport of fresh water to arid lands 

 (e.g. to some of the Aegean islands from the mainland). The new 

 element that enters the problem in this case is that of elastic forces, 

 making this a problem in the general area of fluidelasticity (cf. [ 22] )• 

 The first analysis of stability of the Dracone was by Hawthorne [ 23] . 

 Later, the author studied systematiceilly the dynamiics of flexible 

 slender cylindrical bodies imnaersed in axial flow, for various con- 

 ditions of end-constraint [ 24] , [ 25] , including the case of a towed 

 slender cylinder [ 26] . In the latter case, both rigid-body type in- 

 stabilities and flexural instabilities were shown to exist; stability 

 was highly dependent on the towing speed. 



It was suggested [ 27] that cylindrical or quasi-cylindrical 

 containers towed underwater by a small submarine cotold be used to 

 transport liquid cargoes to and from arctic ports, avoiding the 

 hazards of surface transportation in ice-covered seas. The con- 

 tainers could be either flexible or, more likely, rigid; there could 

 of course be a string of such containers towed by the saine submarine. 

 This idea has talcen added poignancy since the oil discoveries in the 

 Arctic, 



In this paper we shall re-examine the problem of stability of 

 a submerged cylindrical body, both flexible and rigid, towed by a 

 submarine craft. 



982 



