Warships Modernize Power Systems to Manage Next-Gen Hypersonics, Radar & Laser Weapons

By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven

Navy ships will be firing massive, high-powered, scalable lasers to strike enemy ships, destroy drones and possibly even burn through the metal of an inbound ballistic missile or ICBM. 

Future surface ships will be operating new generations of highly sensitive, long-range high energy-density radar systems 35-times more precise than existing systems. Destroyers, cruisers and other warships will be firing larger, faster, longer-range and more precise missiles, even including deck-launched hypersonics, new sensors, high-speed, AI-enabled computing and command and control systems will change current paradigms for maritime warfare by exponentially improving lethality, range and manned-unmanned multi-domain networks.

Technological advances have enabled developers to engineer weapons with greatly improved capacity, however many of them rely upon much greater amounts of expeditionary power. Therefore, identifying innovations which support the need for expeditionary high-density energy output, storage and distribution, has for years been a major focus for Navy developers. 

A ship’s electric drive propulsion system can help support this, which is part of why electric-drive systems are built into Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers and other surface platforms. Additional on-board power-generation capacity, fortified by large generators, can of course be measurably enhanced by innovations with improved on-board power management technology. 

This is why Northrop Grumman is refining, integrating and upgrading its Integrated Power and Energy System solution, technology engineered to store, manage and efficiently distribute electrical power onboard warships. 

Using an energy magazine, IPES is able to aggregate, store and distribute electrical power as needed to multiple systems from a single location. Otherwise separated technologies on board a ship such as radar, weapons or computing typically draw power from different individual systems, something which increases weight and space and results in resources dedicated to one load that otherwise cannot be utilized. 

IPES is intended to optimize and massively improve expeditionary, shipboard power, while increasing distribution efficiency and greatly lowering the hardware footprint. This dynamic, referred to by the military services as SWAP for Space, Weight and Power, seeks to address the difficulties of finding sufficient “space” on a ship given the number of systems it needs to support.