Hunt for Red October silent prupulsion on the sub Is it possible?

Question

This question relates bto anyone who has seen the hunt for red october. The russian sub that conerey is on has a silent propulsion system on board making it possible to move undetected through the waters i think the system was something like a machine that sucked in water from the front and ejected it from the rear hence moving it foward. is it possible???

Answer 1

yes but not to power something that big, but then again UFOs are very quiet arent they.

Answer 2

Magnetohydrodynamic drive

A Magnetohydrodynamic drive or MHD propulsor, is a method proposed for propelling seagoing vessels. An electric current is passed through seawater in the presence of an intense magnetic field. Functionally, the seawater is the moving, conductive part of an electric motor. Pushing the water out the back accelerates the vehicle.

MHD is attractive to engineers because it has no moving parts, which means that a good design might be silent, reliable, efficient and inexpensive. Also known as a caterpillar drive for submarines, this was popularised in the movie The Hunt for Red October as being a "silent drive," an undetectable stealth superweapon in submarine warfare. In reality, the current traveling through the water would create a great amount of gases, and thus noise.

In the 1990s, Mitsubishi built several prototypes of ships propelled by an MHD system. These ships were only able to reach speeds of 15 km/h despite projections of higher ones;



Japan began sea trials of a prototype magnetic ship. Yamato 1 is propelled by two MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) thrusters that run without any moving parts. When completed, the MHD ship should be able to attain speeds of more than 100 knots (125 miles or 200 kilometers per hour), with little noise. This is several times the top speed of today's ships, which are slowed down by turbulence created by the ship's propellers. MHD works by applying a magnetic field to an electrically conducting fluid. The electrically conducting fluid used in the MHD thruster of the Yamoto 1 is seawater. [1]

The major problem with MHD is that with current technologies it is more expensive than a propeller driven by an engine. The extra expense is from the large generator that must be driven by an engine. Such a large generator is not required when an engine directly drives a propeller.

If fuel cells become common, MHD propulsors may have lower costs in some applications than electric motors driving propellers.

A number of experimental methods of spacecraft propulsion are based on magnetohydrodynamic principles. In these the working fluid is usually a plasma or a thin cloud of ions. Some of the techniques include various kinds of ion thruster, the magnetoplasmadynamic thruster, and the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket.

Answer 3

Yes, the magnetohydrodyamic propulsion system in _The Hunt for Red October_ (the "caterpillar drive") is not only possible, but it has been built.

In the book, a pumpjet was used instead of a magnetohydrodynamic drive. This is because such a magnetohydrodynamic drive system would not actually be all that quiet and would be even detectable via non-acoustic methods.

See the sources below for more information about magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) propulsion (and the pumpjet that was used in the book instead) as well as the prototypes that have been built that use MHD.

Answer 4

MHD (Magneto Hydrodynamic Drive) has been known about for at least 50 years. The principle is simplicity itself; put an electric current through a conductive fluid in one direction, and a magnetic field at right angles to the current. The result is a thrust on the fluid perpendicular to both the electric current and the magnetic field. This is the same principle used in an electric motor with the conductive fluid being the analog of the armature of the motor.

Getting it to work in a submarine is, of course, another problem. There may simply be insufficient conductivity of the sea water, or any number of other factors that could easily (torpedo!) this scheme. Meanwhile I'm sure the folks at the NRL are keeping their pencils sharp trying to figure a way..........

Answer 5

Yes there is possible such thing. As, "aztasanga--no offense for misspelling--:)" said the cavitation forms when the propeller sweep through water. But he just missed some thing: the speed of the propellers is crucial. Therefore the guys which takes care of this problem for real, solved this by reducing the speed of the propellers and increasing the blade's surface(to keep the flow rate constant), and modeling them to a more hydrodynamic shape, and ...voila! :) Of course the today's nuclear subs use the direct power of the steam produced by the reactor instead using it to produce electricity and then electrically actuate the propellers, reducing in this way the loss of energy due to the lack of efficiency of the equipments involved. And reducing the number of the equipments involved ,the more quieter the sub is.
Dfriend :)

Answer 6

Yes, it's a screw that pumps water in at the front and sends it out the back. The nuclear reactor produces electricity and that drives a motor. In the old days everyone on board would keep quiet for silent running. But the submarine can be sound-proofed now. My house is virtually soundproof now with glazing, cavity wall insulation and loft insulation - it's the same principle.

Answer 7

In theory a MHD (Magneto Hydrodynamic Drive) is possible.

But, firstly current is dissipated in the sea, making it hard to direct

Secondly, the sums don't add up

Energy Input is less than Energy Output


One last Note; The same was true of MG (micro generation) and solar power not so long ago...so maybe

PS Clancy was briefed by Ex Naval Officers that worked on submarine R&D projects.

Answer 8

The major cause of noise in submarines is cavitation caused by propellors, which is the production of many small bubbles of vacuum when the propellor sweeps through the water. As these bubbles collapse, they produce noise. The same phenomenon produces noise in many other situations, e.g. an electric kettle heating.

This is avoided in so-called "pump-jet" or "water-jet" systems like the "caterpillar drive" used by Red October, which greatly reduce cavitation by surrounding the blades, putting higher pressure on them. They are essentially as you described, sucking water in from the front and ejecting it from the rear. Several real-world submarine classes use these systems, like the British Trafalgar class and the American Seawolf class. They are all significantly more quiet than other submarine types.

Answer 9

Yeah this is perfectly possible especially now we have "high" temperature superconductors.

Basically you apply a electric or magnetic field to sea water - as it's a conductor it will be accelerated by a Lorentz force q(E+v X B). Hence you get a jet engine.

Answer 10

Yes instead of a big noisey proppeller the sub Sucks water in from the front and squirts it out of its bum to move forward.
Or you could read one of the technical answers above that say the same thing

Answer 11

While the propulsion system on subs are pretty quiet, I'm sure they do not use the method described by Clancy. He's a great author, and I love to read his books, but remember it is fiction.