Project Participants: Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc.
Project Start: June 2012
During ship construction, the U.S. Navy shipbuilding industry is required to attach tremendous quantities of equipment with a great variety of configurations, sizes, and weights. Traditionally, equipment is attached by drilling and mounting welded structural foundations. Extensive engineering resources are expended to design these foundations. Significant costs are associated with construction, installation, and mounting of these foundations. In many cases, installation of equipment in this fashion consumes considerable space and weight.
The objectives for this project are to prove the feasibility of transitioning, to the greatest degree possible, from a welded foundation structure with bolted equipment mounting to stud mounting of shipboard equipment /hardware. Consideration will be given to current limitations of stud sizes, shipboard configuration requirements and all applicable Navy ship specification requirements.
The stud welding process will be developed to minimize stud size and maximize mechanical performance relative to identified mounting applications. The project team, which consists of representatives from NAVSEA, HII-Ingalls operations and engineering, the ship design manager and EWI; will collaboratively develop a plan to expand stud welding applications in the DDG 51 ship design and construction process.
This technology, once implemented, could potentially save an estimated $2.46M per DDG 51 Hull. These savings will result from specific reductions in weight, work in process, component outfitting, material expenditures, and more effective resource utilization. While the project focuses specifically on improvements benefiting the DDG 51 class ships, the same benefits described here can accrue to all U.S. Naval ships, which will experience similar cost savings depending on the size of the ship and amount of equipment to be installed.
Project Related Reports & Documents
