New Fuel Cell Technology Shows Safety, Endurance Potential for UUVs
SEAPOWER Magazine Online
By RICHARD R. Burgess, Managing Editor
ARLINGTON, Va. — A new battery fuel cell technology shows promise in providing more power and endurance to unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) and other platforms as well as less potential for fire.
An aluminum-seawater fuel cell technology, being developed by Open Water Power of Somerville, Mass., is able to “safely store about 10 times as much energy as lithium-ion batteries,” said Dr. Tom Milnes, president and chief executive officer of Open Water Power.
Milnes’ company is developing the technology for a variety of uses for defense and commercial applications, such as UUVs and the oil and gas industry. Exploration of the technology was conducted by a joint team, of which Milnes was a member, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lincoln Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Open Water Power has taken the technology further from “beaker-level science,” in Milnes’ characterization, with a $450,000 in funds of from the Rapid Response Technology Office of the Defense Department, the Office of Naval Research, and the Naval Air Systems Command, delivering a developmental model of an aluminum-seawater cell to the Office of Naval Research in December.
The Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division in Maryland put the first cell in an inactive state through pressure, temperature and fire testing this spring and released a report on its performance in June. The testers concluded that “early tests indicate that a reactor [battery] — when in an inactive state — does not generate hazards when exposed to extreme storage temperatures, low pressures, or fires,” according to a Navy briefing.
Open Water Power will be delivering two more cells to the Navy for testing. The next steps for testing by the Navy include a short-circuit test, a water-exposure test and performance tests “to determine energy density and characterize operational behavior,” the briefing said.
Milnes said the aluminum-seawater concept is an old idea but only recently have the barriers to making it operational been overcome. The technology was explored for primarily for its energy density but the safety of the technology also has become evident.
The Navy has had a need to develop a safer battery technology for undersea vehicles since the 2008 fire on the Advanced SEAL Delivery System submersible.
Military Tests New Comsat With 300 Times The Bandwidth
By
SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on June 30, 2015 at 4:00 AM
The military has tested a new
commercial communications satellite system by that potentially offers 300 times the bandwidth of current satellites.
O3b Networks has demonstrated the technology both
at sea, aboard the Navy’s
Littoral Combat Ship Fort Worth in the
Pacific, and and on land, for unspecified “members of the armed forces” at
MacDill Air Force Base, which just happens to be the headquarters of the publicity-shy
Special Operations Command.
How does this work? It’s all about the altitude. The higher the satellite, the larger the area it covers and the slower it orbits. At 22,000 miles up, geostationary (GEO) satellites effectively stand still over a single point on the earth’s surface and can cover a whole continent, making them the standard for communications. But altitude comes at a cost. There’s a literal financial cost, because a rocket powerful enough to get you there is expensive. There’s also a cost in time, because even at the speed of light it takes your message half a second to get to GEO and back.
That’s a long enough lag that even a human brain can notice it. For
high-bandwidth applications like streaming video — say, from military drones — the delay makes for major slowdowns. For high-speed software like
cloud computing, it’s a dealbreaker.
So O3b puts its satellites only
5,000 milesup. That’s considered MEO, Medium Earth Orbit. (Protip: Never say “
Middle Earth Orbit” unless you’re talking about Tolkien). 2,000 miles and below are Low Earth Orbit (LEO), favored by commercial imagery satellites and
spysats, but at those altitudes satellites whip around the planet and can cover very little area at a time, making them impractical for most communications. MEO is a happy medium.
Since a 5,000-mile MEO orbit is a quarter of a 22,000-mile GEO orbit, the lag is likewise only a quarter as much: about 150 milliseconds, instead of 500. That shorter lag combined with a high-throughput
Ka-band signal allows bandwidth that’s
300 times higher, 1.6 gigabits per second instead of the current standard of five megabits.
Meanwhile, each satellite is still high enough to cover a decent swath of the planet. (See the video above for how they hand off to one another). O3b has 12 in orbit currently and plans to launch at least another four. But eight birds were enough for continuous coverage of everything between 45 degrees north and south — roughly from
Minneapolis to
southern New Zealand. Some equatorial areas could get by with just four, such as the Cook Islands, home to some of O3b’s first customers.
In fact, O3b originally created its year-old network with
the developing world in mind. The company’s name is an acronym for the “other three billion,” the estimated portion of the world’s population that lacks access to landline Internet. But it also has a contract with Royal Caribbean, since cruise ships have lots of Internet-hungry passengers and no way to reach a fiber optic cable. Navy warships are in the same boat, as it were, although they want bandwidth for intelligence and
targeting data rather than Facebook.
Special Operations teams, meanwhile, are often in the same position as O3b’s original target audience: scattered in remote places where poverty, geography, or both make fiber unavailable.
Neither SOCOM nor the Navy has gone beyond demos to a permanent contract with O3b, yet. But with
budgets tightening while
bandwidth demands increase, the company has some cause for optimism.
Austal USA Lays Keel for Littoral Combat Ship Manchester
Austal USA Lays Keel for Littoral Combat Ship Manchester - USNI News
Shipbuilder Austal USA laid the keel of the seventh Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) at its Mobile, Ala. yard, the company announced on Monday.
The initials of sponsor Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) were welded into the aluminum keel of Manchester (LCS-14) in the ceremony at the yard.
According to the company, 36 of the 37 modules that make up the 3,100-ton ship have already started construction.
“For Austal, keel laying marks the beginning of final assembly. Nineteen modules have been moved from Austal’s module manufacturing facility and erected in the final assembly bay in their pre-launch position, read a statement from the company.
“The remaining 18 modules will follow over the coming months.”
The ship is the fifth ship of a ten-ship multiyear $3.5 billion contract with Austal USA issued by the Navy 2010 as part of a larger $7 billion block buy for — including ten Lockheed Martin Freedom-class LCS — for 20-ship total.
The first four Independence-class LCS were built under a contract to General Dynamics in which Austal USA was a subcontractor before GD elected not to compete for the multiyear.
Work in the yard is proceeding on other ships.
“Modules for the future USS Tulsa (LCS-16) and the future USS Charleston (LCS-18) are in the early phases of construction,” read the Austal statement.
Earlier this month, LCS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10) was christened at the Mobile yard.
In addition to the Independence-class ships, Austal is building ten Joint High Speed Vessels (JHSV) for the Navy.
