Page 66 - Australian Defence Magazine October 2019

DEFENCE
years – we’ll have the world’s most ad- vanced shipbuilding facilities.”
Fully digital design
The Global Combat Ship itself has now migrated to a fully digital design, which provides BAE Systems with the capabil- ity to embed all aspects of the design and supply chain, right down to single fasten- ers. This design is controlled from a single configuration, which is updated at mid- night every night.
However, this live design concept will prove a challenge in the future when the Hunter is itself a mature design and there- fore achieves ‘separation’ from the refer- ence ship. This will be further exacerbated when the third variant (the Canadian Surface Combatant) reaches the threshold level of design maturity and the concept will require careful configuration manage- ment going forward.
“That configuration man-
agement process is what our engineering teams are working
on right now, so when some-
thing is changed on Type 26
that has a platform implica-
tion on Hunter (or CSC), how
will it be updated in the parts
of the design that are common
and still managed that live 3D configuration?” Lockhart said.
“But it’s a huge step forward
for design evolution (and) it’s
a huge step forward for BAE
Systems also and I think our
customers are already seeing the benefit of managing data on a real-time basis.”
The Hunter design process has recently successfully achieved the Systems Readi- ness Requirements (SRR) milestone. Craig Lockhart said the review made 42 recom- mendations – fewer than the Type 26 design at a similar stage and reflecting the growing maturity of the GCS family design.
“Each of the recommendation categories were things that we were already actively working on with the Commonwealth and they were all broadly related to the changes above the main deck,” he said. “Things like, how is the radar going to interface with the rest of the ship? It has a very high power consumption, so modelling the power dy- namics is a key characteristic we have to get our heads around. Also, things like, how is Aegis being delivered through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreement? How well will it integrate with parts of the CMS such as guns, sensors, sonar, coms etc?”
The next major milestone will be a System Design Review (SDR), to be con- ducted in the fourth quarter of 2020 and which will be a major test of Hunter de- sign maturity.
2020 cut steel
From a manufacturing process stand- point, ASC Shipbuilding will begin the construction of five hull blocks in Decem- ber 2020, as a prototyping exercise to both verify capability but, more importantly perhaps, to test the digital production pro- cess at the shipyard.
The first block to be completed will be to the baseline Type 26 design which, thanks to the lead in fabrication by BAE Systems in Glasgow, can be readily quantified. The fol- lowing blocks will be to the Hunter design and together they will be used to train the lo- cal workforce in South Australia, verify the skills balance and qualify the shipyard itself.
Helicopter operations will be an important part of the Hunter mission set.
built from the ground up to be (arguably) the world’s most advanced naval ship- building facility.
Construction of the new facility was an- nounced as part of the government’s con- tinuous naval shipbuilding strategy, under a $535 million contract with Australian Naval Infrastructure (ANI) – see P44 for more on ANI. Progress on the facility is progressing to schedule and ASC Ship- building hopes to begin gaining access to the yard in March 2020.
“I walked through the shipyard yester- day and it’s coming along quickly, they were putting the last side section on the main, 50-metre high, final assembly build- ing and then the roof structure goes on,” Lockhart said on August 28.
“The key challenge is for us to get in ear- ly and integrate what I call the ‘shipyard production process’ within the infrastruc- ture. We’ll get progressive access from March next year and we’re on target for a successful handover in the middle of next year – and by then we’ll have tested a large part of our digital production processes.
“We are setting up a highly efficient, digitalised shipyard and when we get our hands on it – certainly over the next few
“Prototyping is a reason to test the end to end process. People think that it is about just making sure we can cut steel and weld it together,” Lockhart said. “It’s not. It’s a test of the design itself; it’s a test of the de- sign in the supply chain, to make sure we have the materials available when we need them; It’s a test that we have design guid- ance information that is relevant; It’s a test of the ability to produce an accurate digital work order for the relevant trades; it’s the ability to schedule at the right time. It re- ally is the ability to test without the fear of it going wrong – I’d rather have it go wrong and have the ability to appraise, amend and improve through prototyping.”
ASC Shipbuilding has already begun work on prototyping, long before steel is cut on the first hull block at the end of 2020 and is now actively engaged with lo- cal South Australian companies to work on the development of the digital work order process.
66 | October 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
PACIFIC
HUNTER CLASS
“We are setting up a highly efficient, digitalised shipyard and when we get our hands on it we’ll have the world’s most advanced shipbuilding facilities.”