Bladder Delivery System for UUVs and Weapons

For more than the past 100 years, increasing the range and autonomy of ships, submarines and more recently unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) has been a primary goal for navies around the world and their ship designers. Many modern critical naval operations such as accessing strategic, denied maritime areas and operating and surviving attacks in hazardous and/or hostile environments require further improvements in these areas. High-performance UUVs would be particularly well suited to successfully execute such missions but their autonomy is still generally limited to between 10 and 80 hours of operations. Advanced propulsion systems could increase autonomy to weeks or months, vastly improving UUV"s capabilities to carry out these missions as well as enabling much more ambitious and complex ones. ADA Technologies is partnering with Aero Tec Laboratories (ATL) to propose the development of a refillable twin-skin bladder system for air-independent propulsion systems. The bladder system that we are proposing will utilize materials compatible with stored reactants for a minimum of 30 days. The concept for this device is to be able to provide a controllable fuel flow and expel the entirety of the fuel/oxidizer from the bladder system.