By Geoff Fein
NEWPORT NEWS, Va.–The Navy and Northrop Grumman [NOC] Newport News (NGNN) are still working out how the service and the company will proceed forward following a report on interior welding issues first discovered last year on the USS New Hampshire (SSN-778), a company official said.
NGNN sent the first of its three-volume report to the Navy on April 21, Charles Southall, director advanced submarine programs and author of the report, told Defense Daily.
“The company has been working hand-in-hand with the Navy, assisting them, digesting the report, understanding what the recommendations were, and making sure that the Navy is informed as they make their response,” he said.
NGNN has yet to receive the Navy’s response, Southall added.
Following the discovery of weld failures on New Hampshire during routine testing at General Dynamics [GD] Electric Boat in August and again in October 2007, the Navy and the two shipbuilders began inspecting welds on all Virginia-class submarines in early December (Defense Daily, Dec. 7).
One of the things the Navy initially found out in its investigation was that copper contamination causes cracking and weakens the weld. The Navy began to question the shipbuilder about how copper got into the welds (Defense Daily, Dec. 11).
The root cause was that NGNN welders were allowed to carry two types of weld wire on them. One made from corrosion resistant steel and the other from nickel copper, which would have copper in it (Defense Daily, Feb. 1).
Between 2000 and December 2007, the Navy discovered 15 instances in which there had been some contamination of one type or another in a weld where copper weakened a weld. The Navy knew about those issues and the welds were fixed.
Out of that subset of valves, inspectors found just a few with contamination: one on the Virginia and one on the USS Texas (SSN-775). None were found on the USS Hawaii (SSN-776) or the USS North Carolina (SSN-777) (Defense Daily, Dec. 11).
By January 2008, the investigation expanded to include Los Angeles-class (SSN-688) submarines and aircraft carriers built and serviced at Newport News (Defense Daily, Feb. 1).
“The only recommendations we made in those reports were to do some limited inspections on ships and we’ve not begun that process,” Southall said last week. “[We are] working with the Navy to make sure they are comfortable with those recommendations before going forward.
“We haven’t had any finding where we recommend the Navy go back and cut joints,” Southall noted.
NGNN implemented changes immediately, he added.
“We implemented a wide array of process changes to bolster the procedures we had in place. That has been done,” Southall said. “We continue on further improvements, as you do as a learning organization no matter what, but the immediate corrective actions have all been taken and our processes are much stronger as a result.”
The most notable change is making sure all of NGNN’s welders are educated on the cause and effect of improper metal finding its way into a joint, he added.
“Although we have put into place a few physical procedure changes, the lion’s share of our work has been education for our welder workforce, making sure we focus on the leadership aspect of this because at the end of the day that’s where it all really comes down to,” Southall said.
Southall noted he has seen a lot better communication back and forth between program officials and the deck plate in terms of technical involvement at the deck plate level and support for the welding trades.
“I think that’s probably the biggest improvement I have seen since we began this process a few months ago,” he said. “I am confident now we don’t have [any] problems that the technical community doesn’t know about and are not immediately involved in. The frequency of those issues has gone down. Overall, we have seen marked improvement in the process.”
NGNN has evaluated all of its product lines at this point. The company sent the report on the Virginia-class boats to the Navy in April, followed a month after that with a similar report on aircraft carriers. In June, NGNN submitted its third volume of the report, focusing on all the company’s fleet support work, to the Navy, Southall said. “We have taken a look at every one of our product lines and made…recommendations to the Navy for all of those product lines.”
A Virginia-class submarine, nominally, has 100,000 structural welds and about 30,000 piping welds and socket welds per ship, Southall explained.
“Looking at the defects that we have uncovered, we are talking about [one and two]…single digit. So if you go back to what you have seen from [Vice] Adm. [Paul] Sullivan (commander, Naval Sea Systems Command), for instance, it is literally [ones and twos]. But we still, at the core process, take that extremely seriously. Those [ones and twos] are too much for us,” Southall said.