Stealth and Other Stuff

USS Zumwalt Navy Destroyer
CREDIT: U.S. Navy

The DDG1000  Zumwalt has secrets in its stuff its made of. The old Navy had superstructures, conning towers, and all kinds of impressive profiles that were not built to strike fear, but as a means to track the enemy and pursue a battle. However, the Zumwalt has become my favorite Destroyer in the US Navy. It builds its tracking and cloking mission internally to the deck house walls and ceilings. Nano structures in the material, hide the site, yet transmit its data used in warfare. The Carbon Plastic polymer is essential to the ships advantage over other conventional ships. It remains invisible or quiet from adversarial radar and electronic detection as well as using this composite material to transmit information or locate an adversary. In short, it has a two edge sward advantage over conventional warfare. Besides it extremely tough material as in the bottom of the Ocean tough where this material is used on diving equipment that can go that deep. Below is an excellent read and information from the people who are smarter than I and who can describe the remarkable technological application on our newest war ship in the making. I just love big new and cool ships.

Article from: LiveScience's

Nikhil Gupta is an associate professor and Steven Zeltmann is a student researcher in the Composite Materials and Mechanics Laboratory of the Mechanical and ...

Aerospace Engineering Department at New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering. Gupta and Zeltmann contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A typical syntactic foam comprised of glass, hollow particles filled with vinyl ester resin, as viewed by a scanning electron microscope. The particles are on average 40 microns (0.04 mm) in diameter.
Credit: Nikhil Gupta, NYU

The USS Zumwalt, the United States Navy's latest and largest destroyer, is a stark contrast to the ironclad ships of old. The gray angular deckhouse may bring back memories of Civil War-era battleships, but the technology of the deckhouse and what lies inside is anything but old-fashioned.

The Zumwalt, or DDG-1000, is the first of three ships of the Zumwalt class to be completed. This project is a huge undertaking by the U.S. Navy and represents the single largest line item in its budget. But the new technologies being developed as part of the program will make the Zumwalt class years ahead of any other current warship — one profound example is thedeckhouse material 

The Zumwalt makes extensive use of composite materials in the deckhouse structure — not only to make the structure lighter, but also to control the ship's radar profile and achieve a high level of stealth.

One of the most important and advanced composites used in the deckhouse is a material known as syntactic foam, which incorporates hollow particles that entrap air in a polymer. The hollow particles are microscopic, sometimes as small as 10 microns (about one-tenth the thickness of a human hair), and made of stiff materials like glass. The hollow, particle-filled polymer composite of the Zumwalt's deckhouse acts like a lightweight sponge, but one that doesn't absorb water because the pores are enclosed inside the glass particles. The glass shell of the particles also reinforces the voids, and creates a material that is lightweight, but strong.