This program explores the basic and applied science and technology (S&T) related to the physics of fluid flow around propulsors and appendages to improve the Navy’s propulsor design, sensing and analysis capabilities for improved stealth, efficiency and effectiveness. The long-term vision of this program is to provide the ship and submarine communities with quiet, agile, efficient and affordable propulsor concepts and capabilities through revolutionary improvements in our knowledge base, measurement techniques, computational tools and data-science to meet mid and long-term technical requirements. This program also covers the exploration and demonstration of novel propulsor concepts.
This work supports the Navy’s interest in advanced sea platform performance S&T, advanced sea platform survivability S&T, submarine S&T and naval engineering.
Research Concentration Areas
Provide the scientific and technical foundations necessary to develop novel propulsor concepts for the U.S. Navy’s next generation of platforms with superior stealth capabilities.
- The science and technologies required to reduce and/or eliminate the cavitation on propulsors and appendages, as well as its detrimental effects, including but not limited to radiated noise, material erosion, flow-induced hull vibration and efficiency loss.
- New approaches to the science and engineering required to control cavitation dynamics on and near naval platforms, from inception, through growth, into breakup and eventual collapse and resultant material and structural responses therefrom.
- Basic physics of acoustic energy generation and propagation mechanism resulting from interactions between inhomogeneous and non-equilibrium inflow, turbulent boundary layers and 3-dimensional bodies with various materials, roughness, surface chemistry and geometric discontinuities.
- Novel physics and hydrodynamics scaling methods applied to spatially and temporally varying turbulent flow ingested by propulsors resulting in degraded performance.
Research Challenges and Opportunities
Significant opportunities exist for the development of efficient and accurate propulsor hydrodynamics, hydroacoustics and structural dynamics models in conjunction with 6-degrees-of-freedom vehicle dynamics in varying water depth, water quality and waves. These models should be capable of including accurate physical mechanisms related to maneuvering performance, fatigue response and extreme events such as shocks and impacts.
We seek foundational scientific discoveries that advance multi-fidelity predictive methods, measurement and sensing techniques to predict, detect and characterize the complete lifecycle of propeller cavitation events and their dynamics, focusing on tip gap flow in real-world environments.
Providing for revolutionary improvements in our knowledge base, measurement techniques and predictive methods of radiated sound mechanisms due to 1) Ingested turbulence by propulsors (turbulent ingestion noise) and/or 2) The interaction of turbulent boundary layers with realistic and representative three-dimensional geometries and material surfaces (flow noise) through integrated analytical, computational, experimental and data-science approaches.
We also seek novel approaches to explore and demonstrate propulsor concepts resulting in significant improvements to platform stealth, maneuverability and efficiency while reducing lifecycle costs.
UPDATED: May 2022
How to Submit
For detailed application and submission information for this research topic, please refer to our broad agency announcement (BAA) No. N0001425SB001.
Contracts: All white papers and full proposals for contracts must be submitted through FedConnect; instructions are included in the BAA.
Grants: All white papers for grants must be submitted through FedConnect, and full proposals for grants must be submitted through grants.gov; instructions are included in the BAA.