Rolls-Royce waterjets delivered to new US LCS

Rolls-Royce has delivered the new and advanced Axial Mk1 waterjet for the latest Freedom-variant of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) class, currently under construction for the US Navy.

Rolls-Royce Axial Mk1 waterjets are very power dense, delivering more cavitation-free performance for their size and power than any other waterjet.

At 22MW of power, a single waterjet of this scale can move almost half a million gallons of seawater per minute.

Four of these waterjets will propel the LCS at speeds in excess of 40 knots.

This delivery marks the successful completion of the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Future Naval Capabilities (FNC) program for “Compact, High Power Density Waterjets”.

This new, highly efficient waterjet will now be standard equipment for all future Freedom variants of the Littoral Combat Ships supplied to the US Navy by Lockheed Martin.

The underlying design of the Rolls-Royce Axial Mk1 waterjet has also been scaled for other research and development activity within the US Navy.

Last year the power dense waterjet was retrofitted on Sealion, the Special Operations test craft, for performance demonstration tests.

Most recently, Rolls-Royce has provided the Navy’s unmanned technology community with a 100mm diameter scaled design for the X-Class USV program MUSCL.