Case Study: Hawkes Ocean Technologies achieves 50% weight reduction and streamlined development of deep‑diving winged submersibles with ANSYS Workbench

Streamlining the Development Process with ANSYS Workbench

Hawkes Ocean Technologies, a specialist in small, lightweight winged submersibles, faced the challenge of designing a craft that could “fly” to depths of up to 36,000 ft while withstanding pressures near 16,000 psi, optimizing power-to-weight tradeoffs, and minimizing underwater drag. To address complex anisotropic composite structures and multi-physics requirements, Hawkes relied on ANSYS solutions—ANSYS Workbench with ANSYS Mechanical and ANSYS CFX—for simulation-driven design and analysis.

ANSYS CFX was used to shape the external fairing and reduce drag while ANSYS Mechanical handled stress analysis of composite pressure housings and contact-rich assemblies within the ANSYS Workbench environment, enabling fast CAD-associated iterations. Using ANSYS, Hawkes achieved an optimal hull shape, reduced vehicle weight by 50% through composite design, eliminated the need for a dedicated mother ship (cutting operational costs by about 70%), and validated survivability at extreme depths.