Advanced Structural Watertight Door System Navy SBIR FY2005.2 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2005.2 Topic No.: N05-133 Topic Title: Advanced Structural Watertight Door System Proposal No.: N052-133-0011 Firm: Scimitar Technologies LLC 2005 Big Horn Drive Austin, Texas 78734-3303 Contact: Brian Muskopf Phone: (512) 692-9663 Abstract: U.S. Navy quick acting interior watertight door systems currently in service are heavy, unreliable and very expensive to maintain over the life cycle of the ship. The current Navy standard door system design is over 50 years old and suffers from a number of design deficiencies including the use of heavy corrosion prone materials, excessive number of penetrations, excessive number of parts and metal-on-metal contact during dogging operations. The complex dogging system consisting of rotating metal dogs and numerous tie bars with rotating joints require constant maintenance to keep the frictional parts lubricated and to keep all the components adjusted properly. Corrosion and metal-on-metal friction causes these parts to rapidly wear out and fail, ultimately requiring replacement and repair, resulting in high life cycle costs. This project will develop an innovative, cost effective, lightweight, corrosion and fire resistant, durable, quick acting composite interior watertight door (CIWD) system that will meet the structural load and environmental exposure design requirements for Navy interior watertight door systems. The lightweight CIWD system will significantly reduce life cycle costs by reducing the number parts and door penetrations, eliminating metal-on-metal contact and corrosion of locking mechanism parts, and the need for lubrication of moving parts. Benefits: The successful development of a lightweight, cost effective, durable, fire and corrosion resistant, quick acting composite interior watertight door system will have a significant immediate market with the U.S. Navy surface ship fleet. Current and future surface ships will be able to take advantage of the reduction in weight and life cycle costs that can be afforded with the use of the CIWD system instead of the current Navy standard metal interior watertight door system. Retrofitting CIWD systems into existing surface ships during refit and installing CIWD systems in new ship construction such as the U.S. Navy DD(X) program represents potential sales of thousands of CIWD systems. Lighter, cost effective, fire and corrosion resistant CIWD systems would also be highly desirable in the commercial shipbuilding industry to reduce weight, increase fuel efficiency, and/or increase cargo or passenger payload capacity on cargo/container and cruise ships, ferries, and offshore oil and gas platforms. Return