Refining the Power Station Design of the All-Electric Warship

The next generation of large surface combatants will feature a number of challenging hurdles with regards to performance, complexity and capability whilst being mindful of tomorrow’s fiscal pressures. Over the past two decades, new warship programmes have focussed on more complex, multi-role capabilities necessitating more adaptable mission and platform systems. With tomorrow’s vessels facing a service life between 35-50 years the selected power systems need to be sympathetic of today’s requirements as well as through life technology insertion for tomorrow’s needs. To facilitate this, a number of tomorrow’s warships are looking to adopt an all-electric architecture making use of developing energy storage technologies and more power dense prime movers. Whilst this in itself is no revelation, the impact that electric weapons and sensors have on an electrical power system, as well as the added costs incurred through provision of electrical margins, means it becomes imperative that design experience, lessons learnt, and evolving technologies are all considered during the concept design phase. Electrification of warships has been commonplace since the early 1990s and in-service experiences on platforms with Integrated Power Systems (IPS) are now informing the requirement set for their replacement vessels. The DDG1000 Destroyer as an example, at sea since 2013, has yielded some valuable insights in areas of design optimisation and resilience that can benefit future combatant types. These experiences and the proven products on board these vessels will be augmented by new technologies and configured as part of new architectures to service the new types of loads that accompany the deployment of high energy weapons and sensors. Meeting these demands in an affordable, efficient, resilient and reliable manner will be key to ensuring the future platform’s success and longevity. This paper aims to visit the key in-service experiences of today’s all electric ships whilst considering core aspects of future ‘second generation’ all electric ship design. This will include the need for power system ‘granularity’; investigating the building blocks of power generation that make up these complex systems, whilst analysing the maturity of their constituent parts and the enabling technologies that make these systems possible.