This site relates to a means of propelling military and
other large submarines.
"Air Independent Propulsion", or AIP for short, is engineers' code for any system, other than a battery or nuclear reactor, which can be used to drive a submarine. Usually, in practice, it means some sort of heat engine which gets its oxygen of combustion from a chemical store and exhausts the carbon dioxide waste products overboard.
A considerable amount of development has been put into
these systems; the Russians and the Swedes led the way, followed by
France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Now, at the start of the new
century, orders for submarines with these new power systems are
starting to trickle through.
I worked on the development of one of the systems and I
have summarised the current position, in so far as I understand it, in
a web book which can be downloaded by following the links on Page02. Look at the Preface
Go to download page
Technically speaking, there appears to be considerable
scope for development of AIP systems, and for re-drawing the whole
concept of what we think of as "submarine". I am of the view, however,
that this re-thinking has to be injected from outside the European
military framework within which much of the recent work has crept
forward.
The real pioneers of submarine design are the commercial
companies whose customers are oil commodity companies, pipeline
constructors and maintainers and undersea fibre-and-cable companies.
You can find a thousand and one designs and ideas in the literature,
whereas you would be hard put to tell one military submarine from
another.
This site is owned by Tushino Ltd. The author of the editorial content is Dr D C W Morley