Overview
MAESTRO Marine LLC, Austal USA, NSWC Carderock Division, U.S. Coast Guard – Surface Forces Logistics Center, American Bureau of Shipping, Robert Keane – Ship Design USA, P. Jaquith & Associates, and SPAR Associates Inc.
November 2021 – November 2023
INDUSTRY INVESTMENT: $1.2M | NSRP INVESTMENT $1.1M
Objective:
The proposed NSRP RA Project addresses the problems of inadequate structural performance in-service, and of unsustainable structural maintenance costs at two levels which define the project’s general objectives:
- Project Objective 1: Enhanced early-stage ship structural design for producibility.
- Project Objective 2. Improved in-service ship structural integrity assessment.
Summary:
This project will implement into design and production planning software the accomplishments of NSRP RA Project 2017-443 and develop a new generation of ship structural design optimization tools for early-stage design that will result in:
- Assurance that structural design criteria are met while improving structural producibility and reducing design-build cycle time;
- Improving structural design and service-life assessment to reduce service-life corrosion, heavy weather damage, and structural fatigue cracking while mitigating excessive structural repair and maintenance costs and increasing ship availability;
- Provide comprehensive structural design space exploration capability for U.S. Navy and shipbuilder early-stage ship design processes resulting in robust structures with reduced Total Ownership Costs (TOC) of ships for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard.
Key Deliverables / Benefits:
The team estimates the following benefits:
- For new construction, under RA 2017-443 it has been estimated that the design efficiencies resulting from this research would result in a labor hour reduction of about 20% in the effort to construct just a portion of a frigate hull. In this instance, a savings of approximately $6,000,000 per hull in labor costs only.
- S. Navy annual structural maintenance costs could realistically be reduced by 15% or more, applied to a current annual cost of $200M (based on 2003-2015 costs of $3B). The resulting annual savings is $37,500,000.