System-Level Thermal Management of Pulsed Loads on an All-Electric Ship

With the Navy´s development of the integrated electric warship, large amounts of electrical energy will be made available, thus allowing the addition of pulsed weaponry and sensors. Electromagnetic railguns will increase the thermal load on such a ship by an order of magnitude or more over a conventional gun. To represent the expected loads, a numerical model has been created to simulate the system-level energy balance for a capacitive-based railgun system and is currently in development for a rotating machine-based system. In order to better study the system-level effects of the increased thermal burden, multiple shot profiles and scenarios were used. The simulation outputs are used as inputs to a ship-based, thermal management architecture built in the dynamic thermal software package ProTRAX. Our analysis quantifies additional thermal management capacity that will be necessary for the future all-electric ship and provides the first step in simulating potential ship wide thermal management systems of pulsed loads in a dynamic sense