Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), Gas Turbine Reliability Engineering Implementation Available to Purchase

The development of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and its life cycle support design objectives were driven by three key objectives: 1) High level of ship mission availability while performing any one of the three mission capabilities; 2) Minimal Total Ownership Cost (TOC); 3) Manning compliment lower than the similar predecessor class of ships. To achieve these concurrent goals, the ship design provides functionality including advanced automation for machinery control, as well as mission function reconfiguration and execution. Unfortunately, information-based automated machinery reliability management decision support was not part of the ship design. This type of decision support is vital in enabling a significantly reduced crew and the advance planning required for executing the scheduled short maintenance availabilities. Leveraging existing equipment monitoring technologies deployed throughout the legacy fleet with the reliability engineering approach on LCS will improve the operational availability of gas turbine propulsion systems and allow executing the ship’s Concept of Operations (CONOPS). To address the reliability and TOC risks with the initially defined sustainment approach, a Reliability Engineering derived Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) strategy was developed, such that it could be implemented using a proven remote monitoring infrastructure. This paper will describe the Reliability Engineering based CBM approach and how it will be implemented on the LCS-1 and LCS-2 propulsion gas turbine engines and other critical systems to achieve system level operational reliability, the LCS life cycle support design objectives, and defined sustainment strategies.