Expeditionary Maritime Mine Countermeasures

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is actively seeking new and novel technologies for the design of low cost, miniaturized, expendable payloads to be mounted within Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUV’s) for expeditionary maritime Mine Counter Measure (MCM) missions. Existing Magnetic Influence MCM systems (M-MCM) often rely on extremely large, cumbersome, slow, manned surface-based vessels from either towed or propeller driven platforms. In particular for the magnetic influence modality, these surface based M-MCM vehicles typically require either: a) a massive, high ampacity, looped cable towed behind a manned ship or b) a very large (~ 2-m diameter), very expensive superconducting electro-magnet to generate a large enough dipole moment. Unfortunately, the magnetic field (B-field) of a dipole moment falls off extremely rapidly as a function of distance (~ 1/r3) rendering even the largest diameter superconducting electro-magnet systems relatively ineffective at short distances of tens of meters (e.g. 10-20 magnet diameters) from the central bore of the electro-magnet located at the water’s surface. As such, surface-based M-MCM vessels require enormous and expensive superconducting electro-magnets along with their complex cryogenic refrigeration equipment necessary to maintain the superconducting electro-magnets temperature during the mission.              Energy to Power Solutions (e2P) proposes a lower cost alternative, small, compact, and expendable UUV based platforms that would offer several improvements over surface based M-MCM vehicles including: a) substantially lower capital costs thereby fiscally enabling multiple vessels to perform the M-MCM sweeping mission in a shorter time period, b) lower operational costs by removing manned personnel from surface based vehicles, and most importantly the possibility of c) technical superiority by allowing a far closer approach of the payloads dipole moment to the target area of interest, which is particularly important for M-MCM missions at depths greater than ~ 10-m. The synergistic combination of being able to maneuver the expendable UUV closer (both laterally and vertically) to a magnetic influence mine coupled with the known rapid magnetic field decay of the dipole moment as a function of water depth will allow for the possible replacement of the existing large, expensive, superconducting electro-magnet systems, required on surface based vessels with a far smaller, novel device developed by e2P installed in the UUV’s payload bay. Enabled by the closer proximity approach of the expendable UUV to its intended magnetic influence mine, we will replace the large, manned, towed cable loops or the surface mounted HTS electro-magnet with a smaller, 1000x cheaper novel device as described in the full Phase II proposal.