NAVSEA Completes Waterjet Seal and Evaluation on USS Fort Worth

Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and Southwest Regional Maintenance Center (SWRMC) divers recently completed the first full underwater waterjet seal and evaluation on a littoral combat ship (LCS), USS Fort Worth (LCS 3).

LCS class ships are unique to the U.S. Navy because they use waterjets instead of propellers for propulsion. Each waterjet draws seawater in through a duct, increases the water’s pressure and then ejects it, causing the ship to move.

To protect these waterjets from internal corrosion, the LCS class uses what’s known as a cathodic protection system, a system by which the waterjets are equipped with sacrificial metal structures that are specifically designed to corrode.

Because these structures – known as anodes – corrode so easily, it keeps the rest of the waterjet structure safe from rusting or pitting.

On Freedom-variant ships, the anodes installed on the waterjets need to be inspected and replaced every four months. NAVSEA’s Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV) was tasked to develop a procedure to replace these anodes at sea, instead of having to conduct the replacement in a dry dock.

With the procedure complete for Freedom-variant littoral combat ships, SUPSALV will begin testing a similar process for Independence-variant ships.

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Press Release, January 3, 2014