Future trends in commercial and military shipboard power systems

While novel electric propulsion systems have been applied successfully to naval and commercial vessels over the past century, it has been the commercial sector that has been most innovative in introducing electric drive and pod propulsion technology. Systems featuring AC-AC load commutated inverters and naturally commutated cycloconverters have not gained prominence in the naval sector until fairly recently and pod technology still has design challenges to be overcome before acceptance by the naval community. This paper sets out to explore commonality between present day commercial and naval systems with emphasis on new technology featuring pulse width modulated converters and power dense propulsion motors.