The Lockheed Martin team has a variety of initiatives underway to support the Navy’s need for an affordable class of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). Many of these examples are part of the U.S. Navy’s Manufacturing Technology Program, known as ManTech.
Managed within the Office of Naval Research, ManTech assists in the development of manufacturing technology (and preparing for the transition of this technology) for use in constructing Navy platforms. The program’s current focus is on increasing shipbuilding affordability through reducing the manufacturing cost of current and future platforms.
To support ManTech’s charter and enhance the LCS program, the Lockheed Martin team is working with the ManTech Office to advance some promising projects.
So far this year, the Lockheed Martin team has received five ManTech awards. Two of the projects focus on developing the manufacturing processes and tooling for the affordable installation of a fiber optic cabling plant for LCS. A small number of fiber optic cables onboard LCS will replace numerous copper data cables, which are more expensive to install, heavy and vulnerable to interference. The proposed fiber optic solution has a much higher bandwidth than copper cables; so the cabling plant will serve the ship well into the future for substantial life-cycle cost avoidance. With the advances planned in this project, the technology will also serve other ships, aircraft and additional platforms in the future.
Another 2010 award addresses shipyard record-keeping processes. Today, Navy requirements for critical welds on LCS include documentation on paper weld-record cards that must be maintained even after delivery of the ship. If a record is lost, the joint may have to be removed, replaced and re-inspected. Under this ManTech project, the team is developing a modern computing solution to automate weld records. Paper cards will not be required and the records can be managed in a centralized database. The corresponding record-keeping and work-flow efficiency improvements will reduce the cost of ship production.
These recent awards, combined with previous projects from 2009 and future opportunities, support LCS program objectives by enabling cost avoidance and improving the LCS construction process.
