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Navy Spends $33 Million For Hybrid of the High Sea
coondoggie writes "Some might call it an enormous floating Prius, but others will call it a step in the right direction: A new hybrid electric engine for US Navy ships that promises to save up to 12,000 barrels of oil a year per ship.
The folks who brought you the Predator unmanned flying aircraft, General Atomics, this week got $32.7 million to develop a proof-of-concept Hybrid Electric Drive (HED) system for a full-scale demonstration on board the Navy's DDG 51 Class destroyers.
DDG 51 destroyers are powered by General Electric gas turbines capable of moving the ships along at over 30 knots or about 35 mph. The General Atomics system would meld into this system and let the ship use electric power for slow-speed maneuvers. The engines would provide more power as the ship needed to go faster."
we ca ask the electrical/diesel submarines .... not new tech at all
the ship use electric power for slow-speed maneuvers
But I think this may be a hybrid like a train.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The same thing that happens when 30 tons of oil bursts open on the high seas?
$100 per barrel= costs at the refinery.
The ships are generally in nasty, remote locations. Factor in the cost of building a supply ship and fueling that ship to get the fuel to the destroyer, PLUS escort, PLUS lost mission time and extra miles to go to refueling, and you will probably break even in the first year.
And then the ship has 30 more years to go.
I guess your tax dollars didn't go to elementary math & common sense education, aka high school :-)
I would suspect that, while the "hybrid of the seas" shtick is a good line for jumping on the greenwashing bandwagon, the major interest is in the side benefits: electric engines should almost certainly be quieter and have a lower thermal signature than fossil fuel ones. Having the option to move around purely under electric power, when the situation calls for it and without excessive performance reduction, is probably pretty attractive.
Lower fuel consumption would (slightly) increase the ability to operate at the end of a long, inadequate, intermittent, or otherwise problematic supply chain, which could also be nice.
Oh, wait. We do. Why are we even talking about building hybrids when the Navy already has more than 80 electrics in the form of nuclear powered vessels? With more than 5500 reactor years without an accident, haven't we proved that it is safe?
Probably similar to what happens when one of the Soviet-era sodium-cooled nuclear submarine gets hit... really a torpedo hit that breaches the hull is going to be a Bad Day no matter what.
E pluribus unum
Seriously, just because the general principle has been in use somewhere else, doesn't mean you can't improve on it - and scaling something up is not necessarily a trivial matter.
And to further expand on your point, any military should be concerned with fuel efficiency, because a machine that can stay on-station or can hang in a firefight longer has a distinct tactical advantage. Granted, that is but one variable that must be balanced against many others, but it's really just as important as offensive and defensive capabilities.
The Chinese; some of us know the Cold War isn't over.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
I read some years ago about self-contained nuclear batteries that could be set up in communities without direct connections to the broader electrical grid. Don't we have the ability to leverage similar technologies on our ships? I'm talking about preconfigured reactors with constant power output and finite life (based on fuel rods encapsulated inside the power generation unit). Why not nuclear?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Can you say "Rail Gun" or "LASER"?
These new weapons technologies (needed for interception of ballistic or hypersonic projectiles) will require a colossal amount of electric power. If the ship is already geared up to be capable of storing a lot of power in its batteries, a major hurdle in the deployment of these weapons are overcome.
Maybe they could even use the tremendous kinetic energy of the ship moving at high speed to generate electricity from the motors. Probably only useful in an emergency because it makes your ship a sitting duck!