it is my pleasure today
to give you a tour of the Naval Surface
Warfare Center Carderock Division
my name is Steve Ouimette and I'm the
Deputy Technical Director here at
Carderock
Here at Carderock we like to say this is
where the fleet begins
because all of the navy ships and
submarines have had their start
here at Carderock Division. This is
where we design
ships and submarines for the United
States Navy
we've been doing that for over 100 years
and it first started back in the early
1900s when Rear Admiral David Taylor
started the first experimental model
basin here in Washington DC
and that has grown now to Carderock
Division
so hydrodynamic analysis requires
a lot of unique facilities and we're
going to go on that tour today
and show you a little bit more about
that but first we're going to go and
tell you a little bit more about
Carderock Division so come on
Before we start our tour of some of the
facilities here at the West Bethesda
site
let me talk a little bit about how we're
spread all over the country with some of
our detachments
supporting the Navy in various
geographic locations
first let's go down to Norfolk, Virginia
where our combatant craft division is
combatant craft division works on all
full spectrum
life cycle support of our of the Navy's
small boats and craft
down in the Florida area we have some
signature measurement facilities which
support the east coast
ships and submarines to make sure that
they are as
stealthy as possible and have as reduced
signatures as possible
in the west coast in the
upper northwest we have our Bangor and
Ketchikan detachments
again they support the west coast
ships and submarines
and then we have several facilities one
in Memphis where we do hydrodynamic
testing
and then in Bayview, Idaho where we have
the Acoustics Research Detachment there
so now that you know where we're located
let's go take a look at some more of the
facilities here at West Bethesda
I said before Carderock is where
the fleet begins because
that's what we do we design the Navy
ships and submarines
and make sure that the full-scale
performance of that ship and submarine
is going to perform to exactly the
mission
that's required and that starts with
early stage concepts,
designs, technology, assessments and
integration
and we're working closely with other
warfare centers around the country who
are responsible for
other functions of the ship but we're
making sure that when they all come
together that the ship is operational
so that means we have a lot of test
facilities
where we test the ship to make sure that
it's going to be
hydrodynamically efficient and will have
the mobility required to get
from its mission to completion of its
mission
and so those are done on a variety of
different facilities that we have here
so
we hope to show you that a little bit
later in the video
one of the other things I do want to
mention is that our workforce of
scientists and engineers
also goes out in our local community to
try to
bring STEM education to the
students that are in public schools
private schools
and in other universities and so we're
always trying to promote
engineering, science, and
mathematics to to the local forces so we
host
a lot of STEM events here at Carderock
one of those is the International
Submarine Races
where where student teams design
build and race their human powered
submarines
so every two years Carderock Division
hosts that it's pretty exciting
so I want you to look that up on youtube
and see what that's all about
but now what I'd like to do is take you
to some of the facilities
so once we do make our scale models of
ships and submarines
we bring them to our hydrodynamic
facilities so that's where we're going
to go next let's go
The next facility I'd like to
tell you about is our David Taylor
Model Basin
yes named after Rear Admiral
David Taylor
his vision for a much larger tow tank
was the inspiration for our facility out
here and this was built
85 years ago
the tow tank is actually
two tow tanks-- two parallel tow tanks the
first one over here
is 50 feet from rail to rail and the
other one on the other side
of that bulkhead is 22 feet from rail to
rail
from one end of the basin all the way
down to that
end and i'm sorry it's dark but we like
to keep it dark
because we don't want algae growth in
our water
it is 5/8 of a mile from one end all the
way to the other
the unique aspects of this facility
is that as the carriages roll on these
rails on each side of the basin they're
towing
models of ships and submarines and we're
collecting data
on the hydrodynamic performance of those
ships
as they're going through the water the
uniqueness of this facility
is that from one end all the way to the
other end
the water actually follows the curvature
of the earth and so there's a little bit
of a bow in that water
and therefore the rails have to have
that same kind of
bow so if you put a laser from one end
and bring it
all the way down to the other end that
laser would be about 5/8 of an inch
higher
on that end so just think of the
engineering involved
just designing this facility again this
has been in existence for
85 years and so these
carriages have towed every single Navy
ship that's in existence
so we're ready to go on to our next
facility now so
let's take a look at that
welcome to the
Carderock Division's
Maneuvering and Seakeeping basin or as
we like to call it the MASK
this is a very large wave tank where we
produce
waves to simulate sea state conditions
so that we can test our ships and
submarines
in all kinds of conditions that they're
going to experience
throughout their life of operation on
the high seas
the waves of this wave maker are
produced by
216 paddles and those paddles are
located on this
long end here on the far end there
and those 216 paddles think of them like
keys of a keyboard each key is computer
controlled
to go through a certain motion and those
computer-controlled motions then produce
a particular sea state
and like the fingerprints each sea state
condition around the world is unique
and through satellite and buoy data
we've been able to collect
the sea state conditions all over the
world
and replicate them here so that when our
ships and submarines operate
anywhere in any climate we know
and can predict how they're going to
perform
we do that by doing a variety of
different testing in here with either
tethered, secured, or
free running models
this trellis bridge that you see in the
background
actually spans the entire length of the
basin
that bridge can be rotated
to a 45 degree angle and models can be
towed
along that bridge so we can
actually get 360 degree
heading on any kind of ship condition
and any kind of motion
by having this full spectrum of
maneuverability
and sea keeping and motions we can
predict
the full-scale performance of ships and
submarines before they even get built
that way we can ensure that they're
going to operate anywhere
at any time when we need them
so let's go on to our next facility
welcome to the Manufacturing, Knowledge & Education lab or what we call the
MAKE Lab
this is where we experiment with
additive manufacturing
more commonly known as 3D printing in a
variety of different elements
so we have plastic 3D printers
all the way up to
metal 3D printers and basically what we
do in the laboratory is try to
experiment with
making parts and this is to help in Navy
ships when a
part goes bad or fails how do we go
ahead and produce it rapidly aboard
ship so we're actually installing 3D
printers aboard ships
but we want to make sure that the parts
that we make
in a lab, a nice clean lab, is the same
quality as the parts that we make aboard
ship so folks in this lab here
experiment with the quality
of the product that's produced on the 3D
printer
so a lot of different shapes can be done
with 3D printing
and a lot of different materials can be
used one of the other things we do
here is we manufacture STEM outreach
tools I already talked a little bit
about some of the other
STEM events that we hold here at
Carderock this is called the SeaGlide
and this is designed and homegrown
here at Carderock Division as a STEM
outreach
to teach students about hydrodynamic
principles
and a lot of the parts in our SeaGlide are
3D printed
so that's a little tour of the
MAKE Lab we're going to go on to the
next facility now
One of the other aspects of ship design
is not just the hydrodynamic performance
of the ship
but also is it structurally sound is it
made of the right materials so that it
will withstand the life of the ship
our ships are in service for 30 years
sometimes 50 years with aircraft
carriers so we've got to make sure
that the materials that the ship is made
of and the structural design of the ship
can withstand its entire life
and a lab like this is how we do that
this is the fracture
and fatigue lab and this is where we do
experimentation
on coupons and scale size materials
to see that they're going to withstand
all the stress and strain
that the ship can impart on it there's a
lot of other facilities in this building
to help us do that as well
and that's with materials lab and
corrosion lab and
also our paints and coatings labs so
these are
all pulled together to make sure that
the ship is designed to withstand
all the climates and all the life and
all the loads
that it's going to see throughout its
entire life so that's this particular
lab right
here uh there's a lot more like that and
we're going to go see them now so
come with me
so you've heard me talk about
Rear Admiral David Taylor as being a great
naval architect
but he was also an aerodynamicist and so
when he envisioned the facilities
out here at Carderock he wanted to make
sure we included wind tunnels
in the facilities that we do
experimentation for and so behind me is
one of those original facilities the
8x10 subsonic wind tunnel
this wind tunnel is
still used today
to do aerodynamic experiments and one of
the experiments that we do
is on the top side airflow
characterization
on surface ships and that's important
because a lot of things fly
on and off of our Navy ships whether
they be helicopters
or unmanned aerial vehicles and so the
launch
and recovery of those aerial vehicles
are really important
and they factor into the design of the
ship
another thing that we're concerned about
are all the air
intakes and exhaust systems so when we
design the ship we want to make sure
that
they don't interfere with anything else
and so
again one of the many experiments that
we do here
to validate the designs of our ships
so we're going to go to another facility
now so come with me
so we've been talking a lot about
surface ship designs and the
hydrodynamic performance of those
surface ships
this facility behind me is a pressure
vessel where we test
the structural integrity of
submersibles and submarine pressure
hulls so this facility behind me is 13
feet in diameter
and 40 feet deep and we can put a very
large scale model
of a pressure hull into this facility
fill it with water
pressurize it and simulate different
depths that that submarine or that
submersible will be operating in
just to make sure that the structural
integrity of that vessel
is going to withstand the pressure of a
deep deep water
so this facility again unique
so let's go on to another one
as we close out on our tour it wouldn't
be complete unless I brought you down
here to the curator of models
the curator of models is housed here at
Carderock Division and they're
responsible for
display models and these are different
than the models that we've been talking
about these are not experimentation
models
engineered models these are exact
replicas of historical Navy ships
and so these are on display around the
world
but the curator, residing here at
Carderock, is responsible for maintaining
them
and making sure that the records show
that this is an exact
replica of the ship that it's meant to
represent
and so they have a lot of responsibility
and a lot of models thousands of models
that are under their care now these are
artists
that maintain these models because they
want to make sure that they are exact
replicas
so wanted to make sure that you had a
complete picture of Carderock Division
I'm so glad you joined us today and we
look forward to meeting you in person
here at Carderock Division
