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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."
Now the US navy can bring death upon the infidels in a clean and environmentally safe way.
If 30 tons of Lithium batteries burst open on the high seas? After,say, a torpedo strike?
I bet it would be spectacular.
You would have to subtract the money they were going to spend on a conventional drive line anyway. Better fuel economy may deliver operational benefits as well. More range requiring less infrastructure for refueling.
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I would have thought that the Navy would have led hybrid engine research with everything that was done in WWI and WWII for submarines. Essentially those were hybrid engines, with the diesel's powering the boat on the surface and recharging the batteries, and then using the batteries when the ship was submerged.
That has all been supplanted by nuclear submarines, but you have to wonder where battery technology would be today if the Navy had kept using that system.
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You just did. The life expectancy of a Navy ship is along the lines of 30-40 YEARS. As long as the engine doesn't eat it's self and can just be maintained then you will come close to if not completely pay for it's self. Also oil costs dont factor into the cost of physically refueling the ship. Plus if this engine works as planned, it will likely be significantly cheaper to build more since that 33 million rolls in development costs.
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Only $33 million? For a military contract? Really? Not to be a smartass, but that seems insanely cheap for what they're asking for.
$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 :-)
> Also oil costs dont factor into the
> cost of physically refueling the ship.
Well said. That includes the time it takes to complete the evolution. Especially underway it's a major pain; running those hoses over and keeping station is no joke. If you could cut the number of UNREPs in half you'd be saving resources all over.
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Well, the primary benefit is that we can call this a Class 1 Naval Drive, thus affirming our fantasies about one day living like Commander Jameson.
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.
It is also an important strategic advantage to have a ship that is more fuel efficient as it can stay in the arena for longer before it needs to be refuelled.
This is likely a main driver for this research.
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2009/07/good-reason-for-flight-iii-burkes.html and the reasons for this work.
A defence Industry view
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/327M-to-General-Atomics-for-DDG-51-Propulsion-System-Prototype-05598/#more-5598
A general Atomics view
http://www.ga.com/news.php?read=1&id=262
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?
How does regenerative braking work in the high seas?
You forgot to mention that the Navy has a stated interest in rail guns and energy based weapons. They're already building excess generating capacity into their designs to eventually accomodate those if/when they're ready for deployment, so they might as well take advantage of it while waiting.
What the Navy means by 'hybrid' is not exactly what you'd expect. TFA is light on details, but I suspect the idea is to use the electrical generators on the ship for low-speed propulsion, instead of having to run the main gas turbine engines at 10% load, at which they're very inefficient. There'll be no batteries involved, and no regenerative braking.
Many warships already have two plants capable of driving the propellers. Not so much the USN, but European navies often use gas turbines to provide high speeds (30+ knots), plus a set of diesels for lower speeds (up to 20 kt).
For new ships, electrical propulsion is being looked into for the same reason: you can switch generators on and off so you always have them running at their most efficient power setting.
Actually, there is a mature technology for powering ships with wind. It's called a sail.
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.
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?
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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!
Turbo-electric drives were standard for US battleships of the WWI period, because of fuel economy. The USN wanted to operate at very long ranges from its bases. This continued with the battlecruiser designs, of which two were converted to aircraft carriers. One of those carriers once powered a city (Tacoma, I think) during a power failure.
The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 ended this, since it defined a new "standard displacement" (method of calculating a ship's weight) that didn't include fuel, so to build the biggest warship for the displacement it was much more important to reduce the weight of the engines than to reduce the amount of fuel needed.
In actual service, the turbo-electric drives didn't take shocks well, and so the engines were easy to disable with a torpedo hit.
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German U-Boats in in WWII had dual diesel/electric engines.
Essentially all submarines in WWII had dual diesel/electric engines, and basically any non-nuclear submarines today do, as well. Earlier than WWII, the electric side was standard on all but the earliest impractical prototypes, and the other propulsion was experimented with until everyone settled on using diesel train locomotive engines.
That wasn't for efficiency, but because they couldn't use the fuel-burning engines underwater.
Sail technology is being re-adapted with complex technology to reduce fuel consumption on very high inertia vessels. Look up 'sky sail'.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sky+sail&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
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