Date of Award

2021

Degree Type

Capstone Project

Abstract

The project that was tasked to the group involved designing a method for a system that will be capable of selectively launching small diameter payloads from a large diameter tube, as well as being fully removable and does not require any modifications to the existing launch tube or payloads themselves. The project was presented to Team 14 by NUWC (The Naval Undersea Warfare Center) with very open ended parameters allowing the team to have significant creative freedom in order to use different engineering principles to come up with a viable design to solve the problem. Since this is a problem that is yet to be commercially solved and there are currently no systems designed to do this task, Team 14 conducted research and gathered information on other designs that could be useful in the context of the project. After getting a better understanding of the exact scope of the project, the team conducted a more thorough patent and literature review in order to study existing designs to aid the initial design process. The initial design process is where Team 14 did most of the work in order to come up with some viable solutions to the given problem and all the steps taken after there was a refinement period in order to put together the best design solution. The team in total came up with 120 different initial designs to go through the refinement process and critical review in order to reach the end goal of a single, viable concept that met all of the initial criteria to proceed to the prototyping process. A competitive analysis was performed to narrow down the top 120 designs to just three. Since there were no existing commercially available products available for comparison, the three designs were compared in these categories against the existing method for torpedo deployment, and with each category summed up into a comprehensive value. This competitive analysis determined that Ryan Santosuosso’s design number 3 was the most optimal design. After important meetings with the project’s mentor Mr. Alex Lam and Professor Nassersharif to get more information and insight to help create a better design, Santosuosso’s design 3 was slightly modified to better solve the problem defined by NUWC.

Team 14’s design features two payload tubes that are positioned on the left and right sides of an insert made to fit into the outer launch tube. The small payload tubes each have a set of two locking blocks that descend down from the top of the payload wall, which are actuated by servo motors. The locks from the wall interact with a rectangular extrusion on the payload, and prevent the payload from deploying. To control these servo motors, a control system that uses wireless low frequency radio communication allows the insert to work remotely. A wireless transmitter and receiver pair are used to send and receive signals that an arduino nano interprets and uses to control the servos. In short, once a switch on the transmitter side is pressed, the arduino sends a signal to the servo motors to lift back up to unlock the payload, allowing it to be fired on demand. The launch method used is called a water slug, which is a water pressure impulse created by the outer launch tube itself. This system mimics what is currently used on Navy vessels to deploy torpedoes and other horizontally launched underwater ordinance. The pressure created by the water slug is enough to push the payload out of the tube, effectively “launching” it. The small scale prototype that was manufactured in this project proves the concept of this design, which in turn proves that the general idea of this new process can be implemented and scaled to fit onto any existing horizontal underwater launch system of any size with ease.

Comments

Team Name: Team 14, Project Lachswerfer

Sponsor: NAVSEA Warfare Centers

Document Reference: MCE-402-014-2021

Download

Share

COinS