The U.S. Navy employs a number of large-diameter, large-payload undersea vehicles, and has plans to expand that fleet in the next decade. The Navy requires that these next-generation undersea vehicles have high speed and long endurance (as long as 120 days). Game-changing technologies like this are needed to address these undersea vehicle requirements.
Raytheon is employing a monopropellant developed by James R. Moden Inc. to fuel this engine, and is developing the surrounding system components to change the air-breathing, external combustion engine into an undersea vehicle propulsion system providing electrical energy for electronic control, vehicle/payload power and battery charging. Figure 2 illustrates the operation of this system.