This paper explores the design process involved in the selection of power and propulsion plant for highly constrained designs, where damaged stability rules, conflicting customer requirements, constrained footprint, customer choices, or combinations of the above, drive an arrangement.
Highly constrained designs are likely to become more frequent in the high-end, high-capability naval combatants of the future, as these “Swiss Army knife” platform designs try to respond to increased mission uncertainty, new/developing threat types and allow for incorporation of the latest technologies. Part of this picture of increased uncertainty is also the potential need for increased operation in a wider spectrum of areas that include polar waters, with the attendant constraints on platform systems and the design of engineering spaces.
This increased uncertainty and attendant enhanced user requirements result in a trend of increasing complexity in the power and propulsion plant architectures required to support the new technologies and operational capabilities, as well as in the layout of machinery spaces, which will be examined in this paper.
The need to allow for these additional requirements within a vessel size that meets budgetary constraints, has the potential to impact power and propulsion choices at concept stage, and increases the number of variables that need to be holistically balanced within the design, requiring a level of definition of the electrical load and propulsion train elements that have not “historically” been required for concept design.
This paper aims to assess the implications of these trends for the design of high-capability (and therefore subject to complex sets of constraints), highly adaptable frigates/destroyers, addressing:
• Power and Propulsion Architectural choices, informed by the trends analysis.
• Impact of capability requirements and environmental conditions, including polar requirements.
• Impact of evolving environmental requirements.
• Interaction with evolving damage stability rules.
• Impacts on the design process of the above constraints and large number of variants to be checked.
• Discussion on how new design software and use of AI tools could provide support to efficiently solving these issues in the future.
