Vision: “Naval Missions unconstrained by power and energy”
The Power and Energy Focus Area enables increasingly efficient, reliable, resilient and abundant energy for Navy and Marine Corps infrastructure, platforms, systems and equipment. This focus area develops energy/power/thermal technologies required to deliver advanced naval capabilities and the ability to sustain/operate in contested logistics environments.
Power and Energy Focus Area Lead:
Dr. H. Scott Coombe
harold.s.coombe.civ@us.navy.mil
Research Areas
Energy Storage: Advancing new approaches to traditional battery and capacitor systems including pursuit of advanced chemistries, analysis techniques, safety and containment, battery management systems, thermal management, and domestic manufacturing and sourcing. The research area also addresses alternative fuels and non-electrochemical means for storing energy.
Power Generation: Interests in energy conversion, from fuel-to-electric (i.e. fuel cells), fuel-to-mechanical (i.e. engines), energy harvesting (i.e. photovoltaics), thermal-to-electric and energy transduction in general. The research area also addresses air-independent power, combustion and machinery topics — bearings, gearing, generators and motor technology.
Thermal Management: Encompasses control of two-phase flow in complex geometries, flow instability, evaporative cooling, new materials and architectures for thermal energy storage, novel additively-manufactured heat exchangers, tunable thermal materials — diodes/switches, alternative refrigerants, high thermal conductivity materials, alternative cooling cycles, physics-based and systems level dynamic modeling, and employment of machine learning approaches for modeling phase change heat transfer.
Distribution, Control and Resilience: Advancement of power electronics, real-time hardware-in-the-loop modeling of power architectures, digital twin development, adaptation of AI in pursuit of power system resilience, and advanced electrical conductor research.