Happy Friday evening.
Leviathan’s team would like to share a deeper look at several results from the past month.
If you’re new to the company — or need a refresher — we’re powering the next generation of autonomous underwater vehicles by rebuilding their energy architecture from first principles.
Read more about our mission and engineering philosophy here.
BLUF
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Biofilm simulations produced power on the order of hundreds of milliwatts, giving us a clear path toward powering the CTD sensor fully.
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Our CTD system has settled near $400, significantly cheaper compared to the average $5000 architectures in the market.
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ONR’s strategy release reinforces our focus on integrated undersea systems built around measurable operational problems.
Tech Progress
Endurance in an AUV
Before we go further, we’d like to pause for a moment and explain why our current engineering focus is important to developing energy for endurance. An AUV can be understood much like a human body.
Our biofilm technology is similar to mitochondria which ensures a cell has the energy to perform the task and replenish it when required. Similarly, our biofilm harnesses resources in maritime environments to provide power to payload items in the AUV as necessary. Just as fueling the cell is vital to ensuring the human body functions for extended periods, powering the payload is critical to an AUV – and the biofilm is our primary technology to enable extended endurance.
In order to understand how long our AUV can endure certain conditions, the most important component is the conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) system. The CTD system is similar to a human nose, being critical for constantly sensing an environment without visuals. While the CTD system helps identify what energy output we expect from the biofilm in given ocean conditions, it must also be powered by the biofilm as well. Though the CTD system may seem primitive relative to other technologies onboard the AUV, it is a critical low-power system which is dependent on our biofilm.
Understanding the Environment
A CTD system allows an underwater vehicle to perceive its environment.
Measurements gathered from the CTD system influence navigation, sonar data, and location mapping. For long-endurance autonomy, environmental sensing is not simply another payload. It informs how the vehicle should behave.
By the Numbers:
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System cost: $400
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Estimated average power draw: 40 milliwatts
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Target depth rating: 100 meters
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Sampling interval: 5 seconds
Previously, our goal was to reduce a capability that would normally cost thousands into a $300 in-house system focused on power efficiency. After research and development, we settled at $400, opting for a robust 4-electrode conductivity setup over a 2-electrode setup. The next phase is calibrating the sensor and testing it in river water.
Powerhouse of the AUV
A battery has a set capacity, and AUV missions are planned around it. This constricts missions significantly. Imagine if humans ate in the morning and then had to sleep when the energy extracted from the food ran out. Just as we can eat as we please, Leviathan aims to use the ocean’s ecosystem to refuel the AUV.
Integration of our energy generation simulations with real-world architecture for leveraging latent ocean energy has laid the foundation for the biofilm technology.
By the Numbers:
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Simulated average power density: 112 mW/m2
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Surface area modeled: 2 m2
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Modeled mission duration: 12 hours
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Improvement over baseline: 10,000%
Following these results, our next questions are:
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How closely do live experiments match our simulated outputs?
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Which variables provide the largest practical improvement?
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What is the expected variation in harvested energy across multiple regions of the ocean?
Government Positioning Changes
ONR recently released a new Science and Technology Strategy explicitly stating their priorities, technology bets, and measures of success. It clearly separated its domain from other agencies in the DoW, such as NAVSEA and SOCOM. ONR’s stated focus areas include undersea systems, power and energy, autonomy, naval engineering, manufacturing, and ocean science – all directly adjacent to Leviathan’s development stack.
Since establishment, we’ve been positioning Leviathan’s technology to map to real warfighter and government research needs. ONR’s strategy release now provides us with detailed information on their specifications and the associated priorities.
Over the coming months, we will continue to track changes in department and sub-department requirements, allowing us to align our experiments, engineering, and external partnerships around explicit needs.
What’s Next
The coming month will focus on rapid iteration of various simulations – for hulls, internal electronics, and energy for endurance – before they’re actualized.
In parallel, we’ll continue to build out our AUVs to get measurements from previous cycles.
The objective is simple: turn models into measurements, and measurements into refined vehicles.
— Leviathan
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