Surface Ship and Submarine Hull Mechanical and Electrical (HM&E)
Abstract
Technology programs focused on providing technologically superior warfighting capabilities at reduced total ownership costs for surface and subsurface platforms through investments in applied research and advanced technology development of programs in: a) Power, Energy, Propulsion, Engineering and Design. This element also includes the National Naval Responsibility in Naval Engineering (NNR-NE). Specific research themes are: Power and Energy Technology: Efforts address electrical and auxiliary system and component technology to dramatically improve naval capabilities by providing energy and power resiliency through applied research into energy and power density, control, operating efficiency, operational endurance, recoverability from casualties, and design tools. A major investment focus is providing the power, energy, and thermal management required for directed energy weapons and advanced sensor systems on current and future surface combatants. Significant investments are also focused on improving the energy performance of unmanned systems for the next generation surface fleet, subsea and seabed warfare, and expeditionary forces wherein the limited availability of power and energy are critical. Platform Design and Engineering Technology: This research area seeks to further the applied physics and mathematics necessary to increase force effectiveness by improving platform hydrodynamics, platform structures, platform resiliency/survivability, autonomy, and enabling digital technologies needed to improve naval warfighting capabilities as they relate to platforms/capabilities for use in expeditionary, surface and subsurface warfare. - Hydrodynamics: Critical design for naval platform hydrodynamics that is focused on the applied sciences, computation, laboratory experiments, and at-sea experimentation to develop the understanding and prediction capabilities for all hydrodynamic phenomena associated with naval sea-going platforms including, surface ships, submarines, unmanned vessels and manned small craft. Key research goals are to fully understand the physics of hydrodynamics of wakes, ship dynamics/control, propulsors and their effects on vessel performance and associated energy dissipation into the environment to provide science-based metrics for the evaluation of new design concepts to improve efficiency, signatures, and overall capabilities. - Platform Structures: Focused on all timescales of varying reliability of naval structures. Key applied research is focused on the analysis and prediction for a ship structural system with uncertainty quantification and propagation based on real world usage. - Unmanned Vehicles (UxV): Autonomy for UxVs and related mission functions aligned with Naval S&T strategic focus on autonomy and unmanned vehicles in support of surface, submarine, subsea/seabed naval warfare. - Sea Platform Resiliency: Aligned with survivability S&T strategic focus area, research investigates susceptibility, survivability, and recoverability of all naval platforms. Work in susceptibility of naval platforms concentrates on signature reduction across the acoustic and non-acoustic spectrums. Applied research on survivability seeks to improve the ability of naval platforms to survive under stressing combat conditions, before, during, and after being affected by adversarial actions from kinetic and/or non-kinetic effectors. Research in recoverability of naval platforms seeks to better understand the complex nature of modern damage control measures necessary to enable platforms to recover to capability states necessary to avoid mission kill. - Digital Engineering: Naval engineering and platform design efforts to increase the speed to field and capability resiliency in the engineering process across platform lifecycles through the enablement of virtual design/monitor/usage models to be better informed through improved modeling and data science. Concentration of effort is placed on digitally linking all aspects of a platform lifecycle from ideation to destruction with identifiable metrics of military utility enabling fuller solution trade-space exploration.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2024
- Source ID
- 7dde036013e9c7db7396fb006a7fe723