Electric Warship Early Design Space Methods Incorporating Dynamic Energy Storage

Naval ships are evolving from efficient transport platforms to mobile power stations, supporting diverse missions ranging from littoral strike to ballistic missile defense. Simultaneously, technology and affordability are driving the Navy toward more automated ships with reduced crew size. These trends challenge conventional methods of designing and operating increasingly pivotal shipboard power systems. With the recent success of the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer full-scale Integrated Power System testing and other efforts, the Navy is making headway on platforms that enable high energy weapons and sensors. In keeping with the Navy's progress and its renewed focus on energy efficiency and security, this proposed project addresses critical development challenges for determining electrical architectures and power system parameters. Specifically, the objectives outlined below build a framework upon which early design space exploration can be accomplished. By accomplishing these tasks, the S&T community can make critical comparisons not otherwise achievable. System-level integration of energy storage within electric warships is creating new opportunities. To realize these opportunities, improvements in early design space methods for considering such systems are sought. The overall objective of the proposed project is to advance design space exploration techniques from incremental approaches to systematic approaches in order to answer fundamental questions about the placement, sizing, application, and control of energy storage in electric warship power systems. The currently proposed project is part of an anticipated multi-year effort involving collaboration between the University of Kentucky and the United States Naval Academy. In the initial work, the relationship between dynamic control metrics and system design metrics will be explored and support for the refinement of requirements for early-stage design exploration will be provided. This work will build on highly successful work in integrated engineering plant dependability, system metrics, early-stage simulation techniques, and computational techniques for early design space exploration.