June 27, 201114 yr Lots of chatter around the Web about this latest issue with LCS, and more particularly, USS Independence ... From Defense Aerospace [excerpt] Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates (excerpt)(Source: Wired.com; published June 23, 2011) The Navy’s newest warship is slowly disappearing, one molecule at a time. ... The afflicted vessel is USS Independence, the second in the sailing branch’s fleet of fast, reconfigurable Littoral Combat Ships. Eventually, these ships are supposed to be the workhorses of tomorrow’s Navy. As Bloomberg reported, the Navy has discovered “aggressive” corrosion around Independence’s engines. The problem is so bad that the barely year-old ship will have to be laid up in a San Diego drydock so workers can replace whole chunks of her hull. and [excerpt] Austal Outlines Efforts Against Corrosion in Warships(Source: Austal; dated June 20, 2011) ... Austal is intimately familiar with the management of galvanic corrosion. An electrochemical process, galvanic corrosion occurs when two dissimilar metals, after being in electrical contact with one another, corrode at different rates. According to company records, galvanic corrosion has not been a factor on any Austal built and fully maintained vessel, and our technical experts are eager to support any request to identify root causes of any corrosion issue in any aluminum naval vessel in service today.
June 27, 201114 yr I think a good idea can be to sacrifice 15 knots of speed and rebuild the hull on steel ....
July 10, 201114 yr Wow. Really? So much for quality assurance. Seen a lot of this basic engineering snafu's in '90 when we went to Campbell Shipyard. The ship was worse off after the overhaul. Wouldn't think of this though on a new design.
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