(Photo: Honolulu Star Bulletin)
The one and only Advanced SEAL Delivery System mini-sub caught fire the other day.
The black, 65-foot Advanced SEAL Delivery System minisub was undergoing routine maintenance in its shore-based facility at 8:30 p.m. Sunday when Navy personnel monitoring the battery recharging process noticed sparks and flames coming from near some of the battery compartments, officials said.
It took a while to put the fire out.
The building was immediately evacuated, and seven trucks and 25 federal firefighters responded but it took six hours to extinguish the fire and cool any remaining hot spots in the battery compartment, the Navy reported yesterday.
This thing is a great idea. The usual Swimmer Delivery System consists of the Swimmer Delivery Vehicle which is housed inside a drydeck shelter atop a SSGN. The SEALS exit the submarine into the drydeck shelter, it is flooded down and equalized with sea pressure, and then they drive the SDV away. Yes, they are wearing breathing gear, but they are continuously exposed to the seawater environment. It takes a physical toll on the SEALs while in transit to the mission area.
The ASDS on the other hand transports the SEALs in a dry environment so that they are rested and ready to go once they arrive at the mission area. Originally conceived in the early 1990s, there were originally supposed to be six built. The ASDS can be mated to specially configured LOS ANGELES fast attack submarines.
This is the only one.
The battery-powered minisub, designed to ride piggyback on an attack sub to within range of a hostile coast or other target, has been part of a troubled program that began in 1992. The vessel was delivered to the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command in 2001 and assigned to Pearl Harbor’s SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1 in 2003.
There were initial problems with its propeller system, then problems with the electrical system and batteries.
A 2003 General Accounting Office report said the electrical system repeatedly shorted out and drained its silver-zinc batteries more quickly than the Navy projected. The zinc batteries were replaced with lithium-ion batteries.
The GAO report said the program, which initially called for six vessels, was to cost $527 million but rose to more than $2 billion.
Defense Industry Daily reported in April that “technical, reliability, and 400 percent cost overrun issues proved nearly insuperable.” Plans for six subs were halted in 2006, and the remaining ongoing effort was directed “to boost the performance of the existing sub and complete its operational testing,” the publication said.
I remember being on my first boat and hearing that by the time I got to our Department Head school, they would be looking for Submarine Qualified officers for pilots. Only once did I hear that, then you did not hear about it for a while.
Unfortunately, this is yet another example of our lack of shipbuilding ability. This would give us a capability unlike any other nation, and now our only one is wrecked. The Lithium Ion batteries used represent one of the most advanced battery technologies available, yet as far as I know it is not quite mature. Your car battery uses a lead-acid system, while Hybrid-electric vehicles use Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH). One day it is expected that Lithium Ion batteries will be used in Hybrids, but we are not there yet. In fact, I am surprised that the Navy is using it in the ASDS.
This fire is very bad, and will probably render the ASDS unable to go to sea for quite some time. One might consider this as the loss of a one-of-a-kind strategic asset.
I am looking forward to the investigation.
Its my understanding that all the new Virginia and Seawolf class subs are capable of carrying this unit.
guess it could’ve been worse, look at the Ruskies…
Oh, for god’s sake, $2 billion dollars and they still haven’t sorted out the electrical system?
I’m only an amateur electronic engineer (so far) but I bet I could come up with a robust system if they gave me a lab and a mechanical engineer with a machine shop to help me with the physical construction.
Lithium Ion batteries are fairly mature but they need protection ICs for every few cells in order to ensure there is no overcharging, overdischarging or excessive current flow, since in any of these cases they can rapidly heat up and catch fire/explode.
I would put in multiple layers of safeguards in such a system – cell (or multi-cell) level, bank level and system level. It wouldn’t cost much. Certainly not in the millions of dollars.
After they finish this investigation, they can investigate the San Antonio. After all, we do investigations much better than we build ships.
I was stationed at that command for the first few years of the ASDS testing. As your article points out, there were numerous electrical problems. This caused the termination of several executives and engineers. Northrup Grumman built it instead of Bath or Electric Boat. Go figure..
The best use for the federal bailout that I have heard of to date.
Correction:
The problems exhibited by the Silver-Zinc battery were not caused by the battery itself. The problems were the result of erroneous operating and electronic features incorporated by the Prime,not the battery mfr. Once resolved,the were no longer any problems.
Question: When it was erroneously believed that the silver-zinc battery was the cause of the ptoblems, the name of the Mfgr was bandied about in Bloomberg News,AP ,Hawaiian newspapers and in speeches by Naval emploees, Why is it that the Mfgr of the Lithium Battery ( Yardney Technical Products) has Yet to be identified ?
Nicolas-step outside of your perfect world. There are a lot of reasons why the program has suffered and they (Navy, NAVSEA, NGC) all have a part in it. I promise, you could not successfully complete that task considering all of the constraints, bueacracy and technolgy issues that are involved with this complex machine.
ASDS is a good platform for what it was designed to do…the techonology is extremely complex and one of a kind. Remember there isn’t anything out there remotely close to it, there was no prototype and the scope of was constantly evolving.
It is designed to go on all four classes of sub currently available but only tested successfully on the 688 Class (Charlotte and Greenville) and SSGN Class (Michigan only). They had just turned the corner on reliability problems and were beginning to finally carry out missions without critical failures when this happened.
Well, golly, some might think, lookin’ at the big picture and all, that a six hour fire is pretty darn big critical failure.
Maybe…but its not like you go in there with a hose team to put out the fire. Getting in and out in SCOT airpacks would be a bear. It is surely a critical failure but take a breath before you start blaming the equipment or operators. Nobody knows what happened yet. There were casualty procedures in place and they were followed exactly. It was the OIC’s call with evacuating the building.
ASDS: Submarine built by an airplane company because the submarine company’s bid was closer to truth and therefore higher. We coulda bought a bunch of other things with that money if we knew beforehand what would happen, including minisubs. Huge expense for the building and the staffing and the etc etc etc. OBTW the dry deck shelters are still going, despite being made in 1983 or so. Now, however, they’re on 688s which are more of a challenge to employ.
Pilots: Pretty much SOF and XOSS officers with dive quals, last I looked. Had a buddy who did the job; tough job but he did well, and he got out at 15. It’s a darn shame a job like this is considered out of path for submariners.
Westinghouse was never an airplane company. The division of Westinghouse who won the contract had extensive knowledge in underwater vehicles. Every company’s(including the submarine company) bid was was way below what should have been bid but what was originally spec’d out was not what the customer ultimately wanted.
Again, mistakes were made by every single faction involved…no excuse there. But don’t go saying that the contract was purposely underbid. Everyone underbid the contract.
The dry deck shelters are indeed still going. The SSGN class also has the capability to carry dual shelters and has done ops.
Is it just me, or does it look a lot like a WWII Japanese “Kaiten” suicide torpedo?
From my understanding, the largest Westinghouse’s expertise lay in the design of unmanned vehicles no larger than 19″ in diameter. Although I would agree that all bidders underestimated costs, it seems that those experienced in designing manned submarines would be the way to go.
19″ diameter? Hardly. I agree to your statement that experienced in designing manned submarines would be the way to go. But I would look beyond both EB and NGNN. The fault at NGUS was their lack of knowledge with dealing with the customer and the requirements…not necessarily experience in designing submarines.
Problem:
the electrical system repeatedly shorted out and drained its silver-zinc batteries more quickly than the Navy projected.
Solution:
The zinc batteries were replaced with lithium-ion batteries.
WTF??
You have a electrical system that is prone to shorting out and draining you batteries faster then you would like. So you solution is to replace your zinc batteries with longer higher capacity lithium-ion batteries that will spontaneously ignite when shorted.
Brilliant.
Lithium-ion batteries are a mature technology. But a fundamental characteristic of there chemistry is that the hotter the cell gets the less resistance it has and the more current it can pass. Given that passing current causes resistive heating in the cell, this process rapidly causes the cell to reach lithium’s autoignition temperature. This is a well known and well documented process.
So if you are going to use Lithium-ion batteries as a designer you should be absolutely sure that your electrical system cannot ever allow more then a set amount of current to pass through the batteries.
“The electrical system repeatedly shorted out and drained its silver zinc batteries more quickly than the Navy projected.”
What a joke…do you guys believe everything you read? So the Navy, Northrop Grumman, NAVSEA etc. purposely put an unproven system in place.
Yes, there were issues with grounds. I was on a submarine that had grounds all the time. Don’t forget this isn’t a normal submarine…there isn’t anything on this boat that is normal. There were significant challenges, cost restraints, technological restraints and requirement restraints that really prohibited the engineers from putting forth the best acceptable solution.
Well, golly, some might think, lookin’ at the big picture and all, that a six hour fire is pretty darn big critical failure.
Not compared to some of the other ways we broke that thing at sea. Heh.
LIthium-Ion batteries are more powerful than Nickel Metal Hydride ones. They’re not used in hybrid cars because they’re more expensive. Not a big concern for 1 or a few Navy boats.
Wasn’t it just last year that there were laptops getting trashed by bad LI-Ion batteries? Sony’s?
The latest full size subs built in Europe have hydrogen fuel cell powerplants. The Navy will likely use that tech for more ASDS boats.
Silver-zinc batteries are prone to INTERNAL shorts that drain the cells due to dendrite growths during charge-discharge cycles. Google silver-zinc and dendrite.
Westinghouse was a company with extensive experience in designing minisubs such as the Cousteau subs, advanced prototypes for remote and autonomous underwater vehicles, and equipment to go on SSN and SSBNs. Most of it highly classified prototyping work. There was no lack of expertise until the detail design phase. They fully understood the explosive shock and battery problems.
Westinghouse also had extensive, active contracts with the contracting office.
And all of the companies seriously underbid the contract. The winning companies all had bids within $5M of each other. Westinghouse won on both cost and experience in designing and fielding non-production level vehicles. The solutions from EB and Lockheed didn’t leave room for the SEALs. And EB lacked expertise in most of the small systems required for the boat. They had not had a major redesign in a submarine since the 1960′s – and lacked the design engineers with experience in anything other than adapting existing designs.
But the government made major changes to the specifications once the contract was awarded, and refused requests for adjustments to the price.
These included (it’s a long list, these are examples) more demanding shock requirements, nuclear piping requirements, the mandated use of a bulkier and power hungry nav sonar sensor, and insistence that the boat carry far more consumables – because the regular submarine community refused to carry the necessary supplies inboard. Promised waivers from standard nuclear submarine practices failed to materialize. (The US only had at the time one very old diesel boat – built before nuclear specs. All other subs were built to a series of specs heavily designed to insure that a nuclear boat wasn’t lost through bad workmanship – and relied on the nuclear subs size and powerplant to support the requirements.) All of the COTS solutions the government had requested in the RFP were rejected after award as being unsuitable in a submarine environment.
All of these changes induced panics at Westinghouse. Experience designers, most of them close to retirement, bailed. The few left were moved to other programs. Westinghouse was taken over by NG on the same week the revised preliminary design was reviewed. After that, the handful of remaining experienced designers were gone.
At which time the government changed out techical representatives. Continuity was lost. The detail design was done by aerospace engineers who didn’t have a clue about how submarine wiring worked, or how the materials interacted in salt water. All the while the government beat on the design team to explain why costs were rising, leaving them mostly to address questions and not design.
The government team was trapped as well. Most lacked real expertise, and the few that did spent their time protecting other turfs, not the ASDS. And the new NG team was spending most of its time doing producability compromises that insured the boat would be full of wiring shorts (like no wiring tracks to keep the wires off the floor when workmen crawled through. Workboots on wires.)
In the end, I’d say the real culprit was the “throw the baby out with the bath water” revision of government procurement in the early ’90s, when the government went to “performance requirements” instead of real ones. And went COTS crazy, and forgot COTS doesn’t exist for a lot of DOD applications. It left both the government and the contractor in new territory, unsure of how to manage or address the flow of requirements. The government played a game of bait-and-switch with the requirements, and the contractor, due to internal turmoil, never got its act together at all with regard to how it would manage the effort.
EB was partnered with a German company that has sucessfully built and delivered an identical submersible to the German special forces. The EB design was far superior to the current craft. The design requirements were clearly laid out in the preliminary design phase, however Westinghouse did not create a design to meet them, them waited until the detail design pahse to try and sort them out. This is an example of what happens when contracts are awarded based on “maintaing an industrial base”, not on merits.
The Navy should have cut their losses long ago and moved forward in another direction.
Lowest bider=highest cost overuns
Electric Boat has been designing and building subs for the US Navy for 110 years. No, that doesn’t make them the prime candidate for this sort of work. But I know, just due to recent R&D stuff, that they can build an ASDS right the first time (no overuns). Not only eliminating the problems that have taken the vessel out of service, but also correcting the other design flaws that the customer has been complaining about.
Pat,
I will have to disagree. EB has a long history of cost overruns…could they do the job-yes, could they do the job better than NG (or any other contractor)-doubtful. Been there, done that gave quite an accurate history as to what led to the current problems with ASDS. “Electric Boat has been designing and building subs for the US Navy for 110 years”…to start, ASDS is a submersible and I guarantee you the same specs EB use and are inherently familiar with would not hold up in this area. The specifications are far more stringent than your average sub. Additionally, they may have built a submersible for the German Navy but it has a fraction of the capability that ASDS has and is certainly not identical.
ALL THE MORE REASON TO TAKE A SERIOUS LOOK AT THE HYPER-SUB.