Magstrom Enhancements

The steel hulls of naval warfighters inadvertently alter the earth’s magnetic field. Furthermore, as the ship moves through waters and traverse the earth’s magnetic field, they can become permanently magnetized. These distortions of the earth’s magnetic field can be detected and in turn serve as a trigger to hostile devices such as mines or torpedoes. To counteract this, naval warfighters are commonly loaded with degaussing coils. As the Navy begins the design of the next generation of warfighters, it is imperative to provide an optimized degaussing coil design for the safety of the vessel and her passengers. The use of accurate computer simulation tools that can accurately predict the magnetic signature of a full ship geometry loaded with degaussing tools can accelerate the optimization and design of the degaussing coli system, leading to a tremendous savings in time and money. To this end, under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-04-1-0485, the University of Kentucky has developed a software tool for the Navy that provides the means for accurately simulating the magnetic signature of a ship loaded with degaussing coils. The software, now referred to as Magstrom, was successfully prototyped and validated using an EPA vessel, the OSV (Ocean Survey Vessel) Bold. The NSWC Carderock division would like to use the Magstrom software to perform degaussing coil design. To accomplish this, it is necessary to add a number of additional features to the software to better meet their needs. The focus of this proposal is to address the immediate needs of NSWC and to enable them to interface directly with Magstrom and to provide the proper pre-processing and post-processing abilities that they need. NSWC Carderock division has identified specific tasks that need be done to accomplish this. These tasks are outlined explicitly in the statement of work.