Aluminum Applications to Naval Ship Design and Shipbuilding

In an earlier paper, the authors conducted an analysis of the difference in acquisition and total ownership costs of steel and aluminum equivalent naval ship designs. It was shown that an aluminum ship can be built within just 7.5% of the acquisition cost of an equivalent steel ship. This is possible because of the cascading benefits of the aluminum ship’s significantly lighter weight. The aluminum ship was also shown to have operational and total ownership cost advantages. This paper reports on additional design effort conducted by the authors that validates the structural and fire insulation weight estimates used for both ship designs in the earlier paper.