Navy Energy Program

Mission — Navy Energy Program source

This program supports projects to evaluate, adapt, and demonstrate energy related technologies for Navy aircraft and ship operations to: (a) increase fuel-related weapons systems capabilities such as range and time on station; (b) reduce energy costs; (c) apply energy technologies that improve environmental compliance; (d) examine restrictive fuel specification requirements to reduce cost and increase availability worldwide; (e) provide guidance to fleet operators for the safe use of commercial grade or off-specification fuels; and (f) make needed periodic changes to fuel specifications to ensure fuel quality and avoid fleet operating problems. This program supports the achievement of legislated, White House, Department of Defense, and Navy energy management goals. JUSTIFICATION FOR BUDGET ACTIVITY: This program is funded under ADVANCED COMPONENT DEVELOPMENT AND PROTOTYPES because it includes all efforts necessary to evaluate integrated technologies, representative models or prototype systems in a high fidelity and realistic operating environment.

Mission — Afloat Energy Technology source

This project is designed to enhance lethality, resilience, reach, and sustainment of warfare systems through more effective generation, use and distribution of energy on existing and future surface fleet assets, including Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs), by developing and transitioning energy and maintenance improvements. This project, managed through NAVSEA 05T, identifies, promising energy related technologies through involvement with Fleet representatives, Life-Cycle Managers (LCMs), NAVSEA Technical Warrant Holders, In-Service Engineering Agents (ISEAs), the Navy Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP), PEOs, Industry, and Academia. The project directly supports Department of Navy goals for agility, resilient force posture, and innovation by maximizing energy to increase operational capability (e.g., extend range, increase time on station, reduce energy demand on fuel logistics forces, enable high power combat systems). Potential technology areas include Power Generation and Storage (PG&S), Hull Hydrodynamics (HH), Underwater Hull Husbandry (UHH), Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning (HVAC) Systems, Thermal Management (TM), Main Propulsion Systems (MP), Electrical Systems (EL), Auxiliary Systems (AUX) and Energy Monitoring, Planning, and Assessment (EMP&A). Promising energy related projects that improve the effective use, conversion, storage, distribution, and control of energy to enable the integration with future weapons and sensors onto platforms are proposed each FY for evaluation. Projects are selected based on technical review and business case analysis. Not all proposals are pursued, and funding changes between functional categories or fiscal years may occur based on fleet needs, technology maturity level, ship schedule changes, or other factors.

Mission — Mobility Fuels (ADV) source

This program represents the Navy's only RDTE investment designed to maintain and enhance its capability to operate as a "smart" customer for aviation and ship tactical fuels that are an operationally critical, single point of failure, $4.0+ billion per year consumable requiring worldwide availability and interoperability. Recent field problems have demonstrated the adverse effects that fuel-related problems can have on ship and aircraft performance, durability, and readiness. The potential risk and adverse operational impacts from fuel-related problems over the next decade, given the evolving production technologies, changing feedstocks, more stringent environmental regulations and the introduction of new operational requirements and platforms will continue to increase. This program provides data and enables technology through laboratory, component, fuel system, engine, and platform tests. These evaluations relate the effects of changes in the Navy fuel properties and chemistry to the performance and durability of Naval ship, aircraft, ground and fuel distribution systems. The information is required by technical authorities and decision makers to: (a) assure interoperability with fuel procured from commercial/ international specifications, (b) determine the extent to which unnecessarily restrictive military specification requirements can be relaxed to reduce cost and increase availability worldwide, (c) provide guidance to fleet operators for the safe use of off-specification fuels or emerging CONOPS requiring the use of non-traditional fuels, (d) assure operational interoperability with evolving changes in fuel production technology, feedstocks, environmental regulations and tactical system demands, (e) improve the capability and reduce the cost of field fuel quality surveillance, and (f) facilitate rapid identification and resolution of field identified fuel deficiencies.

Mission — Shore Energy Technology source

This Energy RDT&E Project will model, research, develop, test, evaluate, demonstrate and validate the technical and lifecycle cost viability of installation energy technologies with the goal of energy security, efficiency, surety, and reliability. Efforts will be coordinated across DOD and with other agencies as appropriate. Research areas include new and distributed energy resources, grid and microgrid management technologies including cyber security of controls, installation energy efficiency technologies (lighting, HVAC, building envelope, etc.), energy water nexus, all for use at Naval installations with potential for widespread applicability. Reducing installation energy demand, increasing efficiency and improved installation energy surety improves readiness and enables fleet lethality.

Mission — Aircraft Energy Technology source

Naval aviation must operate independently worldwide often with limited logistics support. Additionally, legacy and emerging aircraft continually add capabilities to enhance their lethality and survivability. Improving an aircraft's utilization and management of energy has a direct relationship to enhanced combat capability to meet the challenges of emerging threats. This program engages technical experts from across Naval aviation, industry, and academia to identify best practices and technologies for development, testing and validation to determine technical viability and assess benefit to mission capability.

Mission — Battery Development and Safety source

1) Provide an advanced battery database with standard battery families for program offices to use to allow for selection of batteries early in the design process increasing the likelihood of design and fielding success, 2) leverage the battery database to begin common battery design efforts to save cost, 3) establish common battery standards and design requirements (e.g., propagation resistant designs, standard battery monitoring and casualty detection systems, etc.) to make advanced batteries safer and therefore deployable, 4) develop and test standard battery storage/container systems that can safely house batteries and withstand catastrophic failure (thermal runaway) of the batteries within the container while minimizing damage to surrounding equipment and platforms, 5) streamline the battery safety certification process especially for high energy storage magazines and other large battery designs (lasers) to allow battery based weapon systems to be fielded in time to support strategic needs, 6) develop hazard mitigation technologies to support rapid safe deployment of advanced batteries to support weapon systems, 7) generate analytics that characterize the Department's current and projected energy/advanced battery needs, 8) establish the Navy's contribution to DoD and cross-service advanced battery supply chain efforts.

Mission — Sec. 2912 Operational Energy Savings source

The Navy needs to extend operational reach of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and target platforms to meet current and emerging threats. This program expands and demonstrates the capabilities of the path optimization software to enhance UAS operators' ability to find the energy optimal path through weather, terrain and airspace constraints to extend range and time on station.

Mission — Applied Biomedical Technology source

The Navy needs to extend operational reach of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and target platforms to meet current and emerging threats. This program expands and demonstrates the capabilities of the path optimization software to enhance UAS operators ability to find the energy optimal path through weather, terrain and airspace constraints to extend range and time on station.

Mission — Congressional Adds source

Project C545: Marine energy systems for sensors and microgrids. Project C998: Wave energy converters for the Navy energy program. Project C391: Cargo drone advanced batteries. The Marine Energy Development (MED) program supports research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) of marine energy technologies for sustained investment and advancement of a variety of marine energy systems. This program, managed through the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, supports research, prototyping, and testing for future naval capabilities related to powering maritime security systems, at-sea persistent surveillance, communications systems, at-sea vehicle charging, and shore installations. The marine energy projects, within this program, are designed to accelerate the development and transition of novel energy technologies, such a marine energy converters, for autonomous systems, tactical ashore and at-sea energy solutions. The RDT&E marine energy projects are conducted through partnerships with research universities, industry, federal agencies and laboratories, and within the Department of Defense to advance the technical maturity of tactical marine energy components and associated systems and subsystems. The program directly supports the Department of the Navy by accelerating fleet unmanned systems forward presence at sea. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command directs and coordinates all aspects of the Wave Energy Test Site (WETS) via its contractor to provide maintenance and operations support of the WETS facility and at-sea testing. WETS has three mooring sites offshore MCB Hawaii to enable testing of Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) devices up to 1MW-rated, in 60m and 80m water depths; and < 40kW-rated WEC devices in 30m water depth. WETS provides support to WEC developers allowing for testing, improvement, and ultimate deployment of cost-effective wave energy production. WETS supports efforts to advance wave energy technology via in-situ testing/demonstration and to evaluate wave energy technology readiness. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is responsible for the research, development and Test and Evaluation (RDTE) of Unmanned Air Systems and all the subsystems that are needed for them to operate successfully. Group 3 Logistics UAS's are a critical focus area and heavily dependent on lithium-Ion Battery packs currently manufactured outside the US. These battery solutions do not meet the quality, reliability and safety needed to meet emerging mission requirements safely in a maritime environment. Design, develop, fabricate, test and integrate ultra-high-capacity batteries into emerging logistics UAS platforms is a critical enabler to meeting emerging operational requirements in a contested environment. This program coordinates battery developers and fabricators, technical SMEs across the DON and UAS designers/builders to produce a cost and time effective common solution applicable to multiple systems to meet operational and safety requirements.

Accomplishments & Planned Programs (12)