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Scientists say Navy ships need power boost

The surface warships of tomorrow may have strange new shapes or be made of advanced new materials, but more important will be the amount of power they can generate, Navy scientists said Wednesday.

“Energy, energy, energy,” said Cmdr. Anthony Nickens, a ships program coordinator with the Office of Naval Research. The power-hungry weapons and sensors of future warships will need much more juice than today’s plants can provide. But the turbines, drive shafts and propellers in conventionally powered warships now use about 90 percent of the ships’ power, Nickens said.

That means engineers don’t have much room to add advanced high-energy weapons — including rail guns and lasers — to the conventionally powered ships now in service. Designers need to rethink new warship classes from the keel up, Nickens said, and figure out how to push the ships through the water at the same time they’re providing more electricity to the accessories.

Nickens spoke at ONR’s annual Science and Technology conference in Washington, along with Rich Carlin, head of Sea Warfare Development for ONR, in a session Wednesday dedicated to novel warship designs and technologies. Such innovation isn’t just desirable for its own sake, he said, but as the Navy spends more time fighting close to shore, ships will need better defenses as terror groups or irregular forces get hold of destructive anti-ship missiles.

Of late, the Navy has placed more emphasis on the missile threat from nonstate forces, as epitomized by the 2006 attack in which the terror group Hezbollah damaged an Israeli gunboat with a C-802 cruise missile. Navy acquisitions officials cited that attack, along with the general importance of air defense, as a reason for canceling five planned Zumwalt-class destroyers in favor of restarting production of older Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

But the two Zumwalts the Navy has already ordered are planned as all-electric ships, which officials hope will demonstrate the technology to propel ships and power their new weapons and sensors.

ONR scientists say lasers will be one future tool for protecting against close-to-shore missile threats. In theory, lasers can hit more targets, quicker, at longer range than today’s Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, but they need more power and put out more heat. Handling them beyond experimental tests requires holistic changes to the way ships are designed, Nickens said.

Once engineers overcome those challenges, warships won’t just have an enhanced ability to defend themselves, researchers said, but they also could have a powerful attack weapon: the rail gun. A warship with a rail gun could stand hundreds of miles offshore of its land target and strike it with a shell fired at Mach 7, which flies into outer space and then re-enters the atmosphere to hit its target at Mach 5.

But the Navy still has a long way to go before it can design a ship to power that weapon, or even make it small enough to practically take it to sea, Nickens said.

“It’s one thing to have a huge capacitor bank in a lab, but it’s another to put it on a ship so a 19- or 20-year old sailor can operate it,” he said.