A Navy official explained last Thursday how the service is trying to add modularity into ships to increase affordability and capability.
Nilo Maniquis, senior Ship Systems and Integration Engineer at Program Executive Office (PEO) Integrated Warfare Systems (IWS) D1, said at Defense Daily’s 2017 Open Architecture Summit that moving ships into modular construction is moving forward and will reduce costs.
He noted the Virginia-class (SSN) attack submarine builders General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat [GD] and Huntington Ingalls Industry’s [HII] Newport News Shipbuilding have been able to reduce submarine costs by $400 million per unit, partially, by using modular construction.
The SSN delivery time has already been reduced from 84 to 60 months “which is amazing,” Maniquis said. Overall, he said, modularity provides several major benefits.
Modularity adds production efficiencies by shortening the timeline and skills needed to install combat system equipment and moves complex production efforts off the ships.
It also can provide the latest capabilities because it separates combat system development from ship construction and can rapidly introduce capability to the fleet with minimal shipbuilding impact. He compared the pre-modularity process to building amenities for a bedroom inside the room itself.
Building this way also makes a ship more upgrade-ready, allowing pier-side installation of new technology and reducing modernization down-time.
Maniquis said the modularity is important because payload and platform acquisition is too slow to keep up with quickly advancing threats.
Currently, a government-industry integrated product team (IPT) has demonstrated and validated an initial concept for combat system modularity. The implementation approach has been identified and is making progress towards a final design. However, to finish proceeding the idea needs leadership buy-in and approval, he said.
Modular construction in practice means building standard ship interfaces that are independent of installed equipment. This entails building a standard deck with interfaces independent of any later installed equipment. The areas are designed with enough services to support growth in power, data, and cooling needs. The decks have a standard threaded stud grid to interface with many types of equipment below a false deck.
For example, a server can be attached to the stud deck, then a false deck floor placed on top of the studs when all equipment is installed.
Maniquis said millions of items on ships are currently welded on to the deck, but under this modular design, equipment is merely bolted to a rack. Therefore, equipment can be modernized by unbolting the device with simpler tools, disposing of the old equipment, and bolting on and attaching new equipment.
The biggest challenge in this process is not engineering, which has been simplified, but social, acquisition, and cultural changes to the process, he said.
Maniquis noted the benefits of this modular design include enabling the use of mass produced equipment that is easily installed, reducing administration costs, reducing change line, reducing labor, increasing material commonality, increasing scheduling efficiencies, and reducing rework.
However, fully designing ships in this modular way is proceeding slowly. Maniquis said language relating to this kind of modularity will be in the Navy’s FY 2018 request for proposals language for multiyear vessel purchases, but that means ships with this kind of capability will not be ready until the mid-2020s.