By Geoff Fein
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is seeking ways to provide warfighters solutions for both near-term and future challenges spanning everything from autonomy to power and energy, to total ownership cost, according to a top Navy official.
“The balance we try and strike is to help with nearer-term needs and transition products, while also keeping an eye on that far horizon with our basic and applied research,” Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, chief of naval research, told Defense Daily recently.
“If you look at our funding portfolio we are split almost in half, about half goes to the nearer-term efforts with about half going to basic and applied research,” he added.
Among the areas ONR has been focusing on has been Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ call for making the service more energy efficient, Carr said.
What makes ONR important is the need to pace the speed of technology change. That often requires ONR to look outside the organization to the private sector. For example, Carr noted the efforts ongoing in developing fuel cells for vehicles.
“The automobile industry is pushing some advances in fuel cell technology and battery technology for cars. That’s a good area for us to collaborate, to watch, to partner,” he said. “In fact, we are partnering with one of the automakers on one of their fuel cells that we are very interested in developing for long endurance UUV propulsion.”
Autonomy is another area ONR is focusing in on as the military looks to move warfighters out of harm’s way, Carr added.
“Autonomy is very, very important both from the standpoint of removing people from harm’s way but also being able to go farther, stay longer, and dedicate your capacity to the payload rather than a person,” he said. “Autonomy doesn’t mean we are going to instantly have fleets of autonomous vehicles doing what people used to do. There will be a transition period where first you unman things. You may have to remotely man them for a while. Eventually, we will push more and more cognition forward into the vehicles and let machines do what machines do well so that our high-value people can do what people have to do best.”
Carr said ONR is also playing an important role in finding solutions for power and energy needs–not just for large platforms–but for Marines and soldiers so that they don’t have to carry more weight for connectivity and computing power.
“We have come up with ways to harvest power from [a Marine’s or soldier’s] motion as they walk. You can harvest power from that,” Carr said.
ONR is also looking at solutions for Marines and soldiers so they can carry fewer batteries and recharge systems when they are not moving, he noted.
ONR is also supporting work in biofuels. “Our role in that is to help develop the engines we will use [with] biofuels, whatever changes need to be made there,” Carr added.
The organization is also looking at the stability of biofuels and how to make sure the is mixable, usable, and transparent to the fuel supply, he said.
As the Navy follows the lead of Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, and begins to explore ways to cut total ownership cost, ONR is also playing a role in reducing those costs, Carr noted.
For example, ONR is looking at ways automation can reduce the cost of production by reducing the number of people involved.
One effort to reduce labor costs that has proven successful is the need to paint ship tanks.
Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, has mandated that all tank coatings will use a rapid cure single coat paint developed by the Naval Research Lab– an arm of ONR.
In the past, when a ship would head into a yard, one of the bigger maintenance cost drivers was tank coatings, Carr said. Workers would have to section off an area of the ship as they spent days going in and out of the tank, blasting, cleaning, and applying coat after coat of paint. “This is a long multi-day process.”
“Now if you can go in early in the life of the ship, coat it once with something that is thick and strong, dries very quickly, you have access to your ship, saved man hours in production and it lasts a long time so you won’t have to do it again,” Carr said. “In the net present value sense of all the things that had to happen, that’s a game changer for maintenance.”