MAINSTREAM ENGINEERING CORP — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N231-031

Description

The conformal arrays of a submarine hull are manually cleaned of biofouling with a diver wielding a cavitating jet wand.  The goal of the eliminating the diver, achieving full automation and higher throughput requires the development of four critical technologies: 1) sensor suite, 2) device tractoring, 3) device adhesion, and 4) cavitating jet control.  Our proposal addresses each of these.  Briefly, our design is a tractored main body that is negative pressure adhered using a portion of the cavitating jet motive.  The main body extends the points of contact to achieve increased adhesion force and redundancy.  Commanded tractoring control is integrated with the adhesion process, employing non-damaging, soft track technology.  A forward-looking sensor array is utilized to form the measurement of biofouling feedback vector.  Command and control of the cleaning jet mass removal rate is achieved with using a table lookup that reverses the biofouling feedback vector.  In Phase I, we propose a series of rapid hardware tests with integrated simulations, moving towards an automated system operating under closed-loop feedback control in Phase II.