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US Navy's High-Tech Ship Loses Power In Panama Canal (usni.org)
bsharma writes: USS Zumwalt suffered engine failure and collided with lock walls while transiting the Panama Canal. The ship lost propulsion in its port shaft during the transit and the crew saw water intrusion in two of the four bearings that connect to Zumwalt's port and starboard Advanced Induction Motors (AIMs) to the drive shafts, a defense official told USNI News on Tuesday. The AIMs are the massive electrical motors that are driven by the ship's gas turbines and, in turn, electrically power the ship's systems and drive the shafts. USNI News reports: "Zumwalt entered the Panama Canal following a successful port visit to Columbia last week -- a visit which the service intended to skip if it thought the engineering problems would continue, several defense officials told USNI News. The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex and unique in the service. Installing and testing the system -- that provides ship additional power margins to power high energy weapons and sensors -- was a primary reason the ship delivered months late to the service. Before the casualty, the ship was set to arrive in San Diego by the end of the year and start weapon system activation period before joining the fleet as an operational warship sometime in 2018. (Zumwalt is the first of three in the $22-billion class.)
"Zumwalt is the first of three in the $22-billion class."
It's refreshing to see the honesty - "$22-billion class" ship is much more descriptive than "Zumwalt class" ship.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's like a diesel-electric locomotive: separate electricity generation and then propulsion using an electric motor.
Power for the entire ship is provided by a pair of Main Gas Turbines (MGTs) and a pair of Auxiliary Gas Turbines (AGTs). The AIMs are the electric motors that drive the propulsion shafts.
In the case of this failure, both propulsion shafts seized up. It's not entirely clear if it's the AIMs that failed, or if something else sized up the shafts first.
The big problem for the Iraqis was that they couldn't fire at a moving target while moving. US tanks kept maneuvering and easily blew the T-62s away.
I was in the Nuclear Propulsion Program in the Navy. By necessity, quality control and training were at near-religious levels. But the systems themselves were designed above all for reliability. One aspect of that was simplicity.
The Zumwalt isn't a nuke, just an over-priced gas turbo-electric. The tech surrounding this project is an engineer's wet dream.However, they have built the flimsiest of paper tigers. It's supposed to be a combatant warship, not a science fair demonstration project, and not a contractor piggy-bank for taxpayer dollars.
The idea of propulsion plant automation as a labor-saving measure is laudable, but the concept is scalar, not linear. There is a tradeoff to be made here, and prudence seems to have gone overboard the garbage. More points of failure with fewer resources to respond to failures does not make for a reliable combat system. Automation gone wild might be OK commercial ships where the price of failure is less, but this is supposed to be a fighting ship, not a bulk freighter.
We have seen the same folly in the littoral combatants and the ridiculously moribund Ford-class carrier.
Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.
I studied marine engineering and have several friends from university who work at the shipyard (General Dynamic Bath Iron Works) where the Zumwalt was designed and built. They are among the most patriotic people I know. Individually, they are also smart. But collectively, they are the dumbest bunch of government contract exploiters I have ever seen. From the ship specification (solution in search of a problem) to the expensive and idiotic design choices, the Zumwalt is a complete disaster. We had BIW representatives on our college campus 10 years ago telling us all about the wonderful things the DDX program (which eventually became the single-ship Zumwalt class) could do. It sounded like a car salesman pitch then, and I am not surprised at all how it turned out. There are very good reasons they only built one and then ordered more Arleigh Burke destroyers instead. There is something very, very wrong when the 15,000 ton Zumwalt destroyer costs $3.96B/unit (excluding R&D costs). For comparison, a much more capable 9000 Ton Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1.84B and you can get a 100,000 ton Ford-class aircraft carrier for $10.44B.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.